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One of the things I like about Outlook is the ability to flip through everyone’s schedule to find a likely meeting time. But when everyone isn’t in the same Outlook system, we end up having to find a time via email. You write, “When can you meet?” And the 7 people you’re trying to get together send you an email back some with when they’re available and some when they’re not available. You then have the fun and excitement of creating a matrix that will show the best time for everybody. Or perhaps you have students schedule time to meet with you one on one?Read More →

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UPDATED 6/24/2012  Have a tablet?  You can go this route instead.  There you are in class and you write on your whiteboard (or chalkboard, I hear those still exist) the most perfect explanation of whatever it is you explain. Wouldn’t you love to be able to save that to share with future students? Or perhaps you’re part way through the material you want to cover when class ends. Don’t you wish you could save what you’ve written so you could start there next class? Do you find that the linearity of PowerPoint is starting to wear you down? Wouldn’t you love to just point atRead More →

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Looking for a new font for your syllabus? Tired of Times New Roman? This is a practical and simple idea. The website Flipping Typical identifies 60 fonts on your computer and displays them all at once. Type in whatever you’d like to see and that text will be displayed in those fonts. Want to see it in bold or italics? Highlight the text, then CTRL-B for bold and CTRL-I for italics. If you want to change the font at the top of the screen, either click on the font you want from the list below or click in the black box and type in theRead More →

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I feel like I spend a lot of time typing the same phrases over and over again. For instance, when students send me an assignment via email, I send them back a ‘got it’ message. When I send them their graded assignment, I write a ‘your assignment is attached’ message. Isn’t there a keyboard shortcut that will do that for me? With PhraseExpress, there is. My preference in this blog goes to free programs and services, and this one technically is. However, if the program thinks you’re a business (by identifying certain business-like words) it will start to give you an annoying little popup promptingRead More →

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You’re sitting at home, and you come across an amazing website that you think is perfect for your students.  How do you get it out to them? I wait and tell them in class. I email them. I add an announcement to my course management system. I add a link to my website. I just bookmark it and let Delicious do the rest. I mentioned in an earlier post that cloud computing is taking content off your computer and moving it up into the internet ‘cloud.’ You can take your bookmarks out of your browser and move them to where you can access them fromRead More →

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When most people think of blogs, they think of what you’re reading right now: An individual writing about a particular topic.  Blogs, however, have become so much more than that. For instance, I maintain a semi-private social networking site for my current and interested former students; that’s a blog post unto itself.  I blog there about psychology, and I ask my current students to do the same.  There, blogs are used to create a sense of community and foster intellectual curiosity. A number of people are moving their websites into blogging software (hosted on the server of a blog service provider or downloaded to theirRead More →

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Classroom Presenter is the coolest thing that’s happened to my teaching since I got a computer in my classroom. If all it did was allow me to present slides in a way that’s a whole lot easier than PowerPoint, it’d be worth it. This is what is displayed to the students in class through the projector. And this is what I see on my TabletPC. Classroom Presenter runs PPT slides, so I don’t have to do a lot to transition to this program.  (I do have to do a few things; see below.) To navigate I just tap on the slide I want.  As myRead More →

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[Update 3/29/2013: While the information in this post is still good, I’ve written a general post about RSS that uses Feedly for illustration. You can find it here.] [Update 3/17/2013: While Google Reader, discussed below, will be shut down July 1, 2013, RSS is still very much alive.  See this blog post to read about a couple other RSS feed readers.] How many websites do you visit a day?  When do you find time to go into your college library’s database to look at what’s new in your professional journals? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had your own personal web-butler?  You know, someone who couldRead More →

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For online collaboration, there are Google Docs and Zoho.  Both are tools that allow collaboration on word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentation slides, among others.  This is ‘cloud’ computing — moving files off desktops and into the internet cloud.  Both seem to try to mimic as much of the desktop experience as possible. But if you want quick and easy (no logins, no ‘sharing’ of files and folders) click-a-link-and-go online collaboration, ScribLink and EtherPad TitanPad may be exactly what you’re looking for. Both of these are great for working with students during virtual office hours as well as collaborating with colleagues. If you’ve tried eitherRead More →

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