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A few years ago I started letting students send me their assignments electronically if they wished. I found that I was writing more on the papers I was grading electronically, and my typing was much more legible than my handwriting! A year or so ago, I made this a course requirement. All assignments now need to be sent electronically. I’ve written before in this blog about how I manage this; for those posts, type ‘grading’ in the search box. As much as I’ve enjoyed going paperless, I’ve discovered an unintended consequence. I’m having a harder time learning students’ names. When I had paper to passRead More →

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On one of the teaching listservs I’m subscribed to, participants were having their periodic row over using PowerPoint versus not using PowerPoint. But this time, rather than simply defending themselves, the PowerPoint users went on the attack noting that using the whiteboard was not exactly the idyllic world the non-PowerPoint users were making it out to be. Whiteboard markers, they argued, were often dried up, and colors other than black weren’t bright enough to see. Throwing away all that plastic is bad for the environment. And they stink! Literally. While I enjoy my pixels, I’m not opposed to writing on a whiteboard. In fact, sometimesRead More →

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Update (5/8/2012 ): Subtextual appears to be out of business.  A number of users are reporting that it no longer works with their system.  The website is still up, but no one is home. Update (11/3/2010 ): bccthis is now Subtextual. Their web address is still bccthis.com, however. As you know, bcc (blind carbon copy) allows you to add recipients to an email message without the other recipients being aware of it. Let’s say you reply to an email message, and you want your department chair to be aware of the exchange but you don’t necessarily want your recipient to know you’re making your departmentRead More →

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Prezi is (free for educational use) web-based presentation software that allows you to create a map of your presentation instead of using slides. You can make your presentations public or private; you can download them for offline use if you’d like.  Prezis can be embedded in a webpage.  Give the link to your laptop wielding students, and they can step through your presentation with you during class.  I haven’t tried it, but you should be able to embed Prezis on a page inside your course management system (e.g., Angel, Blackboard).   If you don’t want your students to have everything you’re showing in class, create aRead More →

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[UPDATED 12/8/2010: For further tips, tricks, and ideas for using QR codes, see this more recent post.] With the number of smartphones on the rise, such as AT&T’s iPhone or Verizon’s Droid, more and more of our students have this technology in our classrooms. Can you harness this power for your own use? In this post I’m going to introduce you to QR codes and barcode scanner software for cell phones, and how they might be useful to you and your students. If you have an iPhone/Droid, search the App Store/Market for barcode scanners. If you have a different web-enabled phone, here’s a handy listRead More →

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If you’re like me, email is a huge part of your work life. Are you using these Outlook time-savers?   Managing attachments To add an attachment to an Outlook message, locate your document, left click and hold on the icon. Now drag it into the body of your email message. It’s attached! In this image, I’m dragging a Word document from my Desktop into the body of my email. This works the other way, too. If you receive a message that has an attachment, left click and hold on the attachment and drag the file icon onto your Desktop or into a folder.   Outlook-specificRead More →

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After a longer-than-planned hiatus, I’m back. And hopefully I have some new stuff that will make your teaching life easier! Last May I explained in a post how to use MS Word and Excel to create grade reports. As I was walking across campus this week, I ran into my colleague in Engineering, Rich Bankhead. He had a great idea. He gives his Engineering students a take-home final that includes solving mathematical problems. This quarter, he gave each student their own data. Students aren’t supposed to work with each other on this assignment, but if they do, they at least have to work the problemsRead More →

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One of the most common complaints I hear about PowerPoint is that it is linear; when you run your PowerPoint, you’re locked into running it in the order in which you created it. This is simply not true. “Presenter view” must be the most underused of the most useful PowerPoint features. All you need is a computer that can give you an ‘extended desktop,’ which is almost all laptops and most desktop computers made in the last few years. This is what is displayed through the projector. But this is what I see on my computer monitor: PowerPoint treats the projector as an ‘extended desktop.’Read More →

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A few days ago I was visiting with a colleague in his office.  He was trying to find the most recent version of a particular file.  He had one copy on his computer and one copy on his flashdrive, but he wasn’t sure which was the most recent.  And he didn’t seem convinced that those were the only two copies.  Did he have another copy on a different flashdrive?  Did he have yet another copy on his laptop? Dropbox lets you get rid of your flashdrive and keep all of your files synched.  Make a change to a Word document, and it’s changed everywhere elseRead More →

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Last month I wrote about electronic grading. With regard to saving the assignment files from students I said, “The papers themselves are saved to a ‘Student papers’ folder in ‘My Documents.’ Each file I save is renamed with standard nomenclature: Student last name, assignment, and whether the assignment was turned in late.” Of course what that means is saving each incoming file individually. I now have a better option. EZDetach, a TechHit product. With two mouse clicks, all of the files attached to email messages in a given folder are saved to a My Documents subfolder, and they even have helpful filenames. As I wroteRead More →

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