I first wrote about the YouCanBook.Me scheduling tool in 2010. YouCanBook.Me checks your web-based calendar to see when you are free, and then makes your free times schedulable by others, such as students. To access YouCanBook.Me’s full power, you need a pro account ($9/month, billed yearly). For what it can do, the money may be worth it to you. It was to me—until Office 365 Bookings.

Recently, Microsoft developed a tool with similar functionality as part of its Office 365 suite. If you have Office 365, you have Bookings. Because Bookings and Outlook are in the same suite of tools, Bookings automatically has access to your Outlook calendar. (If you live in Google Calendar like I do, consider using Outlook4Gmail to sync your Outlook and Google calendars.)

When I send students to my Bookings calendar, they can choose between a “virtual 1-hour meeting” and a “virtual 30-minute meeting”. Once students select one (the 1-hour meeting in the screenshot below), the calendar will show students my next available times. On March 16^th, I see that there are two times available 1:30pm and 2:00pm. If those times don’t work for the student, they can choose a different day. Days that are in black (17, 18, 30 and 31) have available time slots and are clickable. The type of meeting must be selected in order to see the available time slots.

In this case, the student has chosen a virtual 1-hour meeting on March 16^th at 1:30pm.

Now the student can scroll further down the page.

I ask the student to enter their name, email address, phone number (optional). If students enter a phone number, the checkbox at the bottom of the page is automatically checked: “Get booking confirmation and reminder via text message.” Then I ask for “additional information”: student ID number, a topic (from a drop-down menu: advising, question about a psych course you are taking, other), and a little more information about why we’re meeting.

After the student clicks the “Book” button, the student will get this confirmation page.

Also, the student will get an email, such as the one below. In that email, if the student clicks on the “Manage booking” button, the student will be taken to the booking confirmation webpage above where they can reschedule or cancel their appointment.

I also get an email. Most importantly, the appointment is automatically added to my calendar.

If I need to cancel the appointment, I go to Office 365, click on Bookings, then select the “Calendar” from the left navigation menu. I click on the appointment, then click “Cancel.” Now I can enter an “email message to customer”—again, Bookings is built for business, not education—and click “Cancel Booking.” The student will get an email saying the appointment was canceled. On your Outlook calendar, the appointment will now say “Canceled” and the time will switch from busy to free.

If this looks like a tool that would be useful to you, let’s get you set up.

Getting started

Go to Office 365 and log in, if you are not already. If Bookings is not in your list of apps, click the “All apps” arrow. Click on Bookings.

In the Bookings left navigation menu, there are three areas we’ll be using.

The Booking Page contains the settings for your booking calendar. That includes color schemes, the url for your bookings page, time increments (such as 30-minute blocks of time for appointments), and customization for the dates when your students can make an appointment when you are free.

The Services page is where you can enter the form information you want people to fill out to make an appointment. Since the Bookings tool was built with businesses in mind, they used the word “services.” Perhaps you would want customers to fill out one form if they wanted a new dishwasher installed but a different form if they want their current dishwasher repaired. For instructors, you may want students to be able to schedule a face-to-face meeting with you in your campus office or perhaps you may want students to be able to schedule a virtual office hour with you via Zoom. Or maybe even an old-fashioned phone call.

The Business Information page is where you can enter your contact information, such as your office location. Your “business hours” also go here. Think of these as times when you’re okay with students making an appointment with you – if you have free time on your calendar.

Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

Booking Page

Here you can find your Bookings page url. Give this your url to your students; post it in your course management system, for example, or add it to your email signature. Students—or anyone else—can use it to make an appointment with you.

Once we have all of our settings done, we’ll come back here to “Save and publish” thereby making our bookings calendar available. Any time you want to take your Bookings page offline, click “Unpublish”.

Click “Embed” to get the html embed code. Your course management system, for example, may give you the option to enter html code. If so, paste your Bookings embed code there. Students will be able to book an appointment with you from inside your course management system.

I want to give a shout-out to Tom Pollard, Highline College’s database-master. In our staff directory, he created space for an extra tab that can handle embedding. All we need to do as faculty is enter our Bookings url.

Visit my staff directory page. Click on the “Schedule an appointment” tab to see my Bookings calendar.

Scroll down the Bookings Page to the “Scheduling policy” area.

“Time increments” refers to the times students can choose from to start an appointment. Since mine is set to 30 minutes, students see times like 12pm, 12:30pm, 1pm, etc. If this were set to, say, 15 minutes, students would see 12:15pm, 12:30pm, 12:45pm, etc. This doesn’t affect how long the appointment may be. We’re not there yet. This just shows when an appointment can start.

The “minimum lead time” is how many hours in advance an appointment can be made/cancelled. Mine is set to 24 hours. That means that regardless of the availability I have on my calendar, the next 24 hours do not show any free times for me. Unfortunately, the same is true for cancellations. A student may want to cancel a few hours before their appointment, but they can’t do it through the Bookings email they received if it’s within this same 24-hour window. I hope in some future iteration of the Bookings tool, Microsoft separates the lead time for appointments from the lead time for cancellations.

The “maximum” lead time is how many days in advance you’ll let people make appointments. Mine is set to 30 days. Today is March 15, 2020, so the latest availability anyone sees on my Bookings calendar is April, 14, 2020.

Under “email notifications,” check the box to “notify the business [me] via email when a booking is created or changed.” If this is unchecked, appointments will still be added to or canceled from my calendar, but I like getting the emails. I don’t like to be surprised when I look at my calendar.

Scroll down the Bookings Page even farther to the “Availability” area.

The Bookings tool will always check your calendar to see when you are free. Additionally, you can set the dates when you want the Bookings tool to use/not use your calendar.

In the first area, you can see that I’ve told Bookings to show students my free times between Jan 6, 2020 and March 18, 2020 – those are our winter quarter dates. In the next section, I’ve told Bookings to make the dates March 19, 2020 through March 29, 2020 as not bookable. That’s the end of finals week and spring break. In the last box, I give the dates for our spring quarter as bookable.

Clicking the link at the very bottom of the page allows me to add more blocks of time that are bookable/not bookable. [Side note: I have a set a Nudgemail for June 5^th to remind myself to set the next round of availability dates.]

Services

The “Services” page is where you create the different kinds of appointments students can make.

Here, you can see that I have two “services”: virtual 1-hour meeting and virtual 30-minute.

Before the coronavirus drove us off campus, I had two other meeting options here: in-person 1-hour meeting and in-person 30-minute meeting.

At the top of the page, click “Add a service” to, well, add additional meeting times.

Let’s add a “service.”

The “service name” is what you want to call this type of appointment, such as “virtual 30-minute meeting.”

Add a short description, if you’d like.

Enter your office location or your virtual location, such as your Zoom room url.

The default meeting time duration is 1 hour. If you wanted to make this a 30-minute appointment, change it to 30 minutes.

You can add a buffer time before and/or after the appointment. Let’s say that up above you set your calendar time increments to 15 minutes and here you set the buffer to 10 minutes after the appointment. If a student made a 30-minute appointment with you from 12pm to 12:30pm, the 10-minute buffer at the end would make you busy until 12:40pm. The next open time increment when someone could make an appointment then would be at 12:45pm.

At the very bottom of this section is “Maximum Attendees.” If this appointment is for, say, individual advising, you may only want a maximum of one. If you were holding review sessions for the next exam in a nearby conference room that holds 8 people including yourself, you could set the maximum number of attendees at 7. If one person books the time slot, it will still show as available on your calendar for this appointment. For all other appointments it would show you as busy. Once 7 people booked this time slot, it would no longer show as available on your Bookings calendar.

Now we’re getting to the real power of Bookings. Scroll down the Services page to “Custom Fields.” Click the “Modify” button.

These are the questions that go in the form students fill out when they choose this appointment option. Bookings will always ask for a name. I’ve checked “Customer email,” so that will be included on the form. The “Custom Fields” are questions I’ve created before. Clicking on one will add it to the form. Choose them in the order you want them to appear on the form. Here, I clicked on Student ID number, then “please provide…” and I have made the “please provide…” question required. Students will not be able to submit the form without typing something in this box.

If you want to add a question, click “add a question” at the top of the page. Your question choices—as of this writing—are a text box answer or a dropdown menu.

When you’re good with the questions, click Ok at the top of the screen.

On this screen, you can also decide when you’d like a reminder to go out to the person who made the appointment. The default is one day. Add more information to their email confirmation, if you’d like.

Business Information

Remember, as far as Office 365 Bookings is concerned, you’re a business. The “Business Information” page is all about you.

Enter your contact information.

At the bottom of the page, enter your “logo.” It could be your institution’s logo or your photo.

On the right side of the page are your “Business hours.” These are the times during the week when you open for appointments.

For example, Monday, I’m “open” from 12pm to 5pm. Even though my Outlook calendar says I’m free at 9am, Bookings will ignore that time. It will only look between 12pm and 5pm. If I have something on my calendar that says I’m busy between 2pm and 3:30pm this Monday, Bookings will not show those times as bookable.

Once you have your times set, click “Save” at the top of the screen.

Let’s publish!

Go back to the Booking Page and click “save and publish” at the very top of the page. That’s it. You are now open for business. All you need to do now is let people know your Bookings url.

Living near Seattle during COVID-19 has been… interesting. While as of this writing, my college is open for face-to-face courses, our college president wrote, in part, “In accordance with King County Department of Public Health 
guidance, we encourage supervisors to provide telework options to employees whose job duties can be performed remotely without hampering operations or instruction.” This means that faculty have the option to continue to meet their classes on campus or to take their instruction online. “Online” means either an asynchronous course—think of your typical online course—or through some sort of synchronous webconferencing, such as Zoom or Bb Collaborate, or synchronous webcasting, such as Panopto.

For those who are exploring the adventure known as telework, there are some challenges in working with students at a distance. Our course management systems and email are certainly perfectly fine tools for asynchronous communication. It’s the synchronous communication that is challenging.

Whichever you route you choose, please start with your institution’s faculty development office, instructional design office, or your institutional technology office. Your institution may have a contract with Zoom or Bb Collaborate. Whichever one they are with, they will be able to support you and your students with that particular technology.

General guidelines for moving a class online

If you’re facing a campus closed to face-to-face courses, you’re stressed. Your fellow faculty are stressed.

If you’ve never taught a typical, asynchronous online course before, now is not the time to start. Anyone who has tried to pick up a face-to-face course and drop it into an online format knows that it’s not that easy.

If your class meets at 10am MWF, then meet synchronously at 10am MWF using whatever webconferencing tool your institution recommends. Practice in advance. Get a feel for the basics—how to turn your mic/webcam on and off, how to share your screen to show a PowerPoint, how to see questions when students ask them. Don’t worry about all of the other features. Deliver your lecture as you normally would. Are your in-class activities something that can be replicated via video, if so, go ahead and do it. Some tools, like Zoom, allow you to send students to breakout rooms. If small group discussions are an essential part of your face-to-face teaching, don’t be afraid to use the technology available to you to do that.

From the student side

Students are stressed, too.

Most of our students don’t know how to use this new technology, either. Many of our students don’t have good Internet access. Quite a few of our students are doing all of their work on their phones.

Find out what resources are available to your students. If you move to synchronous delivery, can students participate from, say, a campus computer lab or the library? If so, do they need to bring their own headphones?

One-on-one communication

If you’re not in your campus office for office hours, you’ll probably be at home.

Home/cell phone

The easiest way to communicate with a student one-on-one is to call them from your home/cell phone. If you’d rather your student not have your phone number, dial *67 then the student’s number. This will block your number from your student’s caller ID. If you do that, warn your student that that’s what they’ll see, otherwise they may not pick up.

Google Voice

You can use a Google Voice phone number. After you select a new phone number, you can place and receive calls to that phone number. And you can send texts from and receive texts to that phone number.

Slack

For those of you who are feeling more adventurous, try out Slack. Slack is like the old Internet chat rooms. On steroids. Try it out with a small group, first, such as the members of your department, a research team, a seminar class. Use Slack both on your computer and your phone. It’s made for more conversational communication with a group or with individual or select members of a group.

It’s new for everyone

It’s okay if you stumble. It’s okay if your students stumble. Let’s all give ourselves and each other a break. You are doing the best you can.

Last week, after a student confessed to using a “study guide” site to complete one or more of her homework assignments, I did some Googling. While I think I found what she was using—the words and phrases were changed up—I discovered that another of my students was using the answers in their entirety. That led to more searching. Here are two sites that a few of my students are using.

First, let’s find your college or university. In the top navigation bar, click on “Find Study Resources” and search “by School”—K-12 or higher ed.

For my college, here are the “Popular Departments.”

Under each department are documents and Q&As.

Documents

A document is a file uploaded by a student. Clicking on a document gives you a preview of the first part of it. If you want the whole thing, you need to do one of two things. You can pay $119.40/year, $59.85/three months, or $39.95/month. Or you can share your own document.

Q&As

Students can “Ask Expert Tutors” questions—like homework assignment questions—and the “tutors” will, well, do the student’s homework for them—in as little as 15 minutes. If a student signs up for a year’s membership, they can “ask up to 40 Tutor Questions” per year. The 3-month membership allots 20 questions per quarter. The monthly membership grants 10 questions/month. At 8am Pacific Time on Monday, March 2, 2020, CourseHero reports that I can “get help from our Psychology tutors, 538 are online now!”

Is it cheating?

If a student uses a document or an answer from the site, yes, it is cheating. What if a student uploads a document to the site? The only reason to upload a document is to get a document, so that certainly points in the direction of obtaining unauthorized assistance. Your institution’s student code of conduct may also explicitly state that giving unauthorized assistance to other students is also cheating. The Washington (State) Administrative Code 1231-125-100(1)(a) (part of the rules that govern my college) reads “Cheating includes any attempt to give or obtain unauthorized assistance relating to the completion of an academic assignment” (emphasis mine).

If you can’t match a document with a student, you may not know which of your students has uploaded content, although sometimes students make it easy. A couple of my students have used their names in their Course Hero account name. Others left their names on their documents when they uploaded them.

As you would with any instance of cheating, submit a report to the person/office at your institution who handles student conduct code violations.

Copyright violation?

If the document or question a student has asked includes your words, it is a copyright violation. For example, my students have submitted questions I’ve asked on homework assignments or take-home exams—word for word.

On Course Hero’s copyright page, there is a “Submit Takedown Request” button. You can use this to request that documents students have uploaded be removed and that questions that you wrote and that students have asked “tutors” for answers to be removed. In Part 2 of the form, note that you can click the button to “Add another work.” The “Remove Item” button is for deleting the request you just entered. It’s confusing, I know.

When I have submitted these requests to Course Hero, the offending documents/Q&As have been removed with a day or two.

Here, students can ask “experts” for help with homework, they can have Chegg look for plagiarism in a paper, and they’ll solve a student’s math problems (and they’ll show their work)—all for a price.

The cheating my students have done has come from asking “experts” for help with my assignment questions. I have found questions new to my assignments this term posted to Chegg. Finding them is a bit more labor-intensive than it is with Course Hero. At Chegg, you need to paste content from your assignments into the Chegg search box.

Like Course Hero, you will see the question and part of the answer. To see the answer, you need to pay $14,95/month (allowing you to ask 5 questions/month) or $19.95/month (allowing you to ask 20 questions/month).

Is it cheating?

If a student pastes one of your homework questions, someone else answers it, and the student uses that answer or some version of that answer, yes, it’s cheating.

Copyright violation?

If the question the student asked on the site was written by you, then Chegg is violating your copyright on those words by using them without your permission.

Chegg, unfortunately, makes it harder to submit takedown requests. At the very bottom of their pages, in the “Legal Policies” column, click on “Intellectual Property Rights.” This is the pdf they want you to complete. It’s not a fillable pdf, so you will have to open it in a program that will allow you to edit pdfs. There is only space on the form to enter one web address at a time. I recommend filling out all of the information and saving it as a new document. Change the webpage information, and save as a new document. Repeat. Once you have all of the documents complete, “fax it to Chegg at (408) 855-8954, email it to CopyrightAgent@Chegg.com, attn: Copyright Agent – Dana Jewell, or mail it to Copyright Agent, Chegg, Inc. 3990 Freedom Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054.”

Conclusion

When you find a few students who are cheating, remember that their cheating is not about you. And, just as importantly, most of your students are not cheating.

What “study guide” sites are your students using?

My college is on quarters, so it’s time once again for me to reset the due dates on my courses in preparation for spring quarter. I organize my class schedule by weeks, so it’s helpful for me to know what week it is in the quarter—both when I’m setting my due dates for the upcoming quarter, and when we’re in the middle of a quarter. When I do this at home, I write the week numbers on a paper calendar to help me with scheduling. Today I was working on it in my office where I don’t have a paper calendar. I thought, “Hmmm… I wonder if Google Calendar has a notes-type feature that I could tack on to the beginning of each week.” It doesn’t. And then it hit me. I could create a new calendar just for the week numbers.

After I took a couple minutes to beat myself up for not thinking of this sooner, I thought I should share this calendar hack with you.

In Google Calendar, at the bottom of your list of calendars, click the plus sign next to “Other calendars.” From the pop-up menu, choose “Create new calendar.” On the next screen, name your calendar, then click the “Create calendar” button. I called mine “WEEKS”.

Give Google Calendar a minute, and then your new calendar will appear in your list of calendars. I then added an “all-day event” to each Monday in the term, naming the weeks as I went.

To see the weeks, I check the WEEKS calendar box. To turn them off, I uncheck the box.

Update 11/29/2022: For those of you on quarters, Yolanda Miller has created a Google Calendar with weeks that may match yours. (Thanks, Yolanda!)

USB condoms

Let’s start with USB condoms, because, frankly, that’s why you decided to read this post. It’s okay to be honest. We’re friends.

The cable you use to charge your phone and your tablet serve as both a power cable and a data cable. Electricity and information both flow through this same cable. As long as you are home, you are safe. When you venture out into public, however…

Let’s say you’re at the airport and you’d like to top off your phone’s battery before boarding your plane. You plug your USB cable into one of those now-ubiquitous charging stations. Unfortunately, someone with nefarious intent has been there before you. Once you plug in your USB cable, the nefarious person begins to steal any data that flows through your cable, such as passwords, or sends malware to your phone.

This is called juice jacking.

How much do you need to be worried about it? Frankly, probably not much. As of this writing there have been no known incidents. But we do know it’s possible. The FBI officially recommends not using USB outlets in public spaces [added 4/11/2023]. And since it started getting press a couple months ago, someone is probably working on it.

What you do about it depends on your risk tolerance.

Option 1: Do nothing.

Option 2: Don’t use public USB outlets. Instead, use your device’s adapter and only plug into electrical outlets.

Option 3: Use a USB data blocker, dubbed a USB condom. Plug your USB cable into a device that’s about the size of a flashdrive then plug the device into a public USB outlet. You can purchase two PortaPow Data Blockers from Amazon for $11.99.

The real risk

While it’s unlikely you’re in much danger from using a USB outlet for charging your device. In addition to juice hacking there is much more risk with using public wifi. Every time you connect to public wifi, such as at a coffee shop or airport, a nefarious person may be lurking on that same wifi. With the right skills that nefarious person could swipe any data you send over that connection, such as your login names and passwords.

VPNs

Like a USB data blocker, you can put a layer of protection between you and public wifi. In this case, the solution is software, not hardware.

A virtual private network (VPN) is well, a kind of private network. After installing the VPN on each of your devices (phone, tablet, laptop – anything that may leave your home and connect to the Internet), every time you connect to public wifi, sign into your VPN with your username and password. That login provides the layer of protection you need. All of the information flowing between your device and the Internet will be encrypted. No one can read it without knowing your VPN username and password.

There are several very good VPNs out there. I use Private Internet Access (PIA), but ExpressVPN is always on the lists of excellent VPNs. A good VPN costs a few dollars a month, but most occasionally run big sales or offer year-long or multi-year purchases. You can install the VPN on all of your devices, but there is a limit to how many devices can connect to the VPN simultaneously from that same account. PIA allows 10, and ExpressVPN allows 5, for example. There are free VPNs, but they may not be as fast or may limit how much data you can send through their servers each month. If you want to go that route, I recommend Hotspot Shield Free or TunnelBear.

On your device, when you connect to a VPN, you can choose where the server is that you’d like to connect through. Going through a VPN will always be slower than traveling the Internet naked. The VPN is a password protected gateway. You first have to go through the gate, don your virtual hazmat suit, and then head out to the Internet. It takes a little bit of time to do that.

For fastest speeds, connect through a server that’s physically closest to you. From my home router, I generally don’t use a VPN. My password protected router gives me the shielding that I need. Here are some sample Internet speeds I just ran today; check yours with Speedtest.net.

From my home router without a VPN: download speed was 77.0 Mbps; upload speed was 9.46 Mbps

Connected to PIA VPN going through a Seattle server, the one closest to where I live: download 75.2; upload 8.81

Connected to PIA VPN going through a New York City server that’s almost 3,000 miles away: download 59.0; upload 7.92

Connected to PIA VPN going through a Norway server that’s about 4,500 miles away: download 33.5; upload 5.3.

Yes, you can connect to servers just about anywhere in the world. This is very handy if you’re traveling in, say, Europe, and want to spend an evening watching Netflix. You may, though, only watch Netflix shows for a European audience. If you want access to all of the Netflix shows you watch at home in the United States, you can use a VPN, and choose a server location in the United States. Netflix will think your device is in, say, Chicago even though you and your device are actually in Vienna. If you intend to use your VPN in this way, choose ExpressVPN as your VPN provider. Netflix isn’t fooled by all VPNs, but ExpressVPN, at least as of this writing, can pull it off. (Here is a short list of other VPNs that can, too.) ExpressVPN is a little more expensive than other VPNs; you get what you pay for.

Travel router

If you travel a lot and are frequently connecting several devices to, say, a hotel’s wifi, it can be a hassle. You (and your spouse, and your kids) have to connect each of your devices, and then—as you now know—run a VPN on each of your devices. Some hotels limit the number of devices that can connect to their wifi. The last hotel I stayed in had a limit of six devices. Since it was just me, I came in well under their limit. If I added my wife and a couple teenagers (fyi, I don’t have any teenagers, and, no, I don’t want yours), we’d easily be over the six-device limit.

Consider purchasing a travel router. The travel router connects to the hotel wifi just like any device does. The router works by adding a new password-protected wifi signal. My travel router uses the same name and password as our home wifi. As soon as the travel router is up and running, all of my devices see the home wifi name and will connect to it automatically. And what about that hotel device limit? The hotel sees the travel router as one device; it won’t see all of the devices connected to the router.

With a travel router, there is no need to use a VPN since it comes with the built-in protection of a username and password and encryption. (If your router doesn’t come with encryption automatically enabled, enable it.)

I use the TP-Link N300 travel router. Setting up the software and connecting can be intimidating. It’s been a couple years since I bought it, and other travel routers have since come on the market. Try this RAVPower travel router for about the same price.

Conclusion

A couple years ago, I wrote about password security. In that post I advised using a password manager, like LastPass. Still, the number one threat to your online security are your passwords. Strong, unique passwords for every site you log into will provide you with the best protection.

VPNs, travel routers, and data blockers (if anyone actually steals data that way) keep your passwords protected as they flow from your device out onto the Internet.

Stay safe out there.

For the discussions in my online courses, I have added an expected minimum word count to help students better gauge what is expected of them. Each initial post has three sections, and each has a different word count minimum. Same with the discussion responses.

I am certainly not going to count the words myself. And it seems silly to copy and paste each discussion post into Word to get a word count.

Instead, I added a word count tool to my browser.

In Chrome, I use Word Counter Plus. In Firefox, I use Word Count.

While both look a little different, they work exactly the same way. Once you’ve installed your chosen tool into your chosen browser, highlight any text on a webpage, right-click, and then choose the tool from the menu. You will get a pop-up that will give you the number of words and number of characters in your selection. Word Counter Plus will also give you average word length and longest word length thereby illustrating that just because you can calculate a statistic does not mean that you should.

To make the pop-up go away, you have a couple options.

Chrome’s Word Counter Plus: Click the “OK” button, or press the ESC key on your keyboard.

Firefox’s Word Count: Click the X, or go about your business and the box will disappear in 6 seconds.

Happy counting!

For those of us who like to—or least tend to—have a lot of browser tabs open at once, Chrome’s new “tab groups” along with the previous ability to pin tabs can help bring order to the chaos.

Below, you can see what I currently have open in Chrome. The six tabs on the left are “pinned.” These are tabs that I frequently use, so I’ve pinned them. I have easy access to them without them taking up so much real estate. To pin a tab, right-click on it, and select “Pin”. [Extra credit: how many of my pinned tabs can you identify based on their icons? Answer below.]

The functionality that Chrome recently added is tab grouping. Above, you can see that I’ve created two groups: Canvas and News. Each group has its own color and its own label.

To use tab grouping, you will need to switch it on.

Go to: chrome://flags/

Scroll down to “Tab Groups” and enable it. [Pro-tip: This is a lengthy list of Chrome features. It’s faster to hit CTRL-F and search for “Tab Groups”.]

Switching “Tab Group” to “Enabled” will produce a “Relaunch” button in the bottom right corner of your screen. Click on it to close your browser and, well, relaunch it.

Now when you right-click on a browser tab, you can add it to a new group. To select several tabs at once, hold down CTRL and left-click on each tab you want to group together. Once you have them selected, let go of the CTRL key, right-click on any of the tabs you selected, and select “add to new group”. Once you’ve created a group, right-clicking on a tab will give you the option to “add to a new group” or “add to an existing group.”

If you are in a group when you open a new tab, that new tab will be added to that group. To change which group a tab is in, click and drag it to a different group.

When you create a new group, Chrome will automatically assign the group a color.

Left-click on the colored circle to choose a different color and to name your group, if you’d like. Here I’ve entered “News” in the text box.

Finally, to delete a group, close all of the tabs in that group—or move all of the tabs out of the group.

Conclusion

If “be more organized” was one of your new year’s resolutions, organize your Chrome tabs, and call this one resolution complete!

Extra credit answers: from left to right, Message by Google, Google Calendar, Gmail, Trello, Google Keep, Outlook 365 To-Do

My college has been with the Canvas learning management system for a few years now. There are many things I like about it, but the cumbersome number of clicks it takes to delete a bunch of pages is not one of them. And I wanted to delete a bunch of pages.

We recently turned on “Atomic Search” within Canvas that allows instructors and students to search within a course. If a page is published, it’s fair game to be returned in search results. As I copied courses from quarter to quarter to quarter, I never had to worry about those unused pages. They weren’t linked to anything, so students had no way to get to them. But now, with search, they do. I have to delete or at least unpublish dozens and dozens of pages. Over 100 pages. Unfortunately, Canvas does not have a native bulk delete feature where you can just check boxes next to what you want to delete, and then click a button to delete them all. That would be awesome. Instead, Canvas pages can only be deleted one by one. And the last thing I want to do is delete 100+ pages one by one.

Because of how Canvas is built, however, knowledgeable individuals can build tools that will make using Canvas easier, such as using a Google spreadsheet to change assignment due dates. In this case, a shout out to James Jones for creating a way to delete or unpublish a bunch of Canvas pages in one fell swoop using Google spreadsheets.

Follow the instructions. All you need is a Google account.

Several years ago, I moved away from using presentation slides in my courses. They just didn’t work with the interteaching model I had started using. Instead, I returned to where I started my career: writing on the board. My current board is digital (interactive short-throw projector with whiteboard software), so my “markers” never run out of ink. For my conference presentations –except for my tech talks—I still use presentation slides, specifically PowerPoint. I know some of you really love Prezi. As my colleague Steve Chew has observed, Prezi is the only presentation software that requires the audience to take Dramamine first. I’ll attend your Prezi talk, but my eyes will be closed.

Since psychologists know a lot about how we learn, I’m not sure why it has taken so long for one to compile the research and give us an evidence-based/evidence-informed book on how to create effective slide presentations. Gary Fisk, psychology professor at Georgia Southwestern State University, has given us Slides for Students: The Effective Use of Powerpoint in Education*. I confess that the title confused me a bit. I wasn’t sure if this was a book meant for students to use to help them create effective slide presentations or if it was a book meant for instructors to use in presenting content to students. It is indeed the later. In an early chapter we learn that PowerPoint was developed for sales presentations. And, indeed, taken out of the box and using the default settings, it may be effective in sales. In education, however, we are communicating a different kind of message, so a different approach to creating slides is needed.

The first chapter sets up why this book is necessary: we are not born knowing how to create effective slide presentations. Chapter two details every complaint about slide presentations and every counterargument offered in response. If you’re of a certain age and have stood in enough faculty breakrooms for enough years, you have heard it all already. You have permission to skim this chapter. If you consider yourself new to teaching, it’s worth a closer read. If you’re curmudgeonly, chapter 2 will give you some fodder. If you are anti-curmudgeonly, chapter 2 will give you an arsenal of replies.

In chapter three, Fisk summarizes some of the original research in this arena. Early studies compared lectures using presentation slides with lecture that did not—that used, say, a whiteboard instead. There were no differences in student performance on exams or in the course. With hindsight we can see that this wasn’t quite the right question to ask. Presentation slide software is just a tool. We don’t ask whether a hammer is effective. Instead, the question is what’s the best way to use the tool and under what circumstances. Using a hammer is very effective at, well, hammering. It doesn’t work very well at drilling holes. You can’t blame the hammer for that! Students like presentation slides, but they also acknowledge that there are some downsides. I’m more interested in whether presentation slides can be used in a way that actually helps students learn, not whether students think they help them learn. Fisk draws the same conclusion, “The guiding spirit [of this book] is to determine how teachers should use this medium to augment their teaching and thereby improve student learning.”

Take a minute to reflect on some of the worst presentations you have seen, whether it be as a student or at a conference.

Fisk cites survey research on what audience members hate the most about presentations. Number 1 on the list: the presenter reads the slides. I have mixed feelings about this one. As a presenter, I cannot assume that everyone in the room has the visual acuity to read my slides, no matter the size of the font or the degree of contrast. To say, “Take a minute and read this slide,” makes me worry that I have systematically excluded a chunk of my audience. Having written that, the solution is obvious. I shouldn’t put the text on the slide at all. How about I just say it? If it’s a quote, I can have the quote in my notes. The quote does not need to be on the slide. That also solves the second biggest complaint audience members have: too much text on the slide. That complaint is really about how hard it is process what’s on the slide. Fisk reports that complaints three and four are in the same vein: “small text and overly complex graphics.” Frankly, so is another problem: over-stylized presentations. While programs like PowerPoint give you the option to add all kinds of bells and whistles—PowerPoint 2019 includes new features like zoom and morph—don’t use them. They will distract more than they will add. Also, don’t go crazy with the technology. The less technology you use, the smoother your presentation will be. The more technology you use, the more things can go wrong. While you’re troubleshooting and fixing the technology, your students/audience members have lost the thread of what you were saying, and they have moved on to other things, e.g., Instagram. Fisk covers some other “presentation killers,” but most of them come down to one general presentation principle: keep it simple.

How should you structure your simple presentation? Fisk suggests appealing to emotion, although he cautions that too much emotion can overwhelm an audience. Many psychology textbooks start their chapters with a vignette, often a real one, but not always. This draws the reader in; they want to know how the story ends. A presentation is no different. Use emotion to help your audience care about what you are saying. Sprinkle emotion throughout your presentation, such as (appropriate) humor. Fisk offers several other ideas for drawing in an audience. End your presentation with a take-home message.

Through your presentation, remember that you are not locked into your slides. You control your slides; your slides do not control you. While you may have been thinking of a particular path when you created your slides, through student questions during your presentation, you may discover that a different path may be more appropriate. It’s okay to take that path. You don’t have to announce to students that you are taking a different path than the one you intended. If students are locked in to thinking that they are there to hear you deliver a fixed lecture, they may perceive such an announcement as a sign that you are going off on a tangent or being derailed by student questions. You’re not. You are flexibly responding to the learning needs of your students in that moment.

One of the benefits of having a sensation and perception expert write a book on slide presentations is that we get an explanation of how our slides should look due to the function and limitations of the human visual system. In chapter 7, Fisk makes recommendations for the best font size and background for your slides based on the lighting in your room. And he offers some caution about the use of color. Fisk gives us some concrete advice on how to design the layout of our slides. Psychologists will be interested in the rationale that’s based on Gestalt principles of organization.

Fisk nicely summarizes the relevant research on attention, cognition (such as memory), and behavior (such as notetaking and attendance). He, then, offers concrete suggestions on how to design your presentation to make best use of what we know.

In chapter 16, Fisk brings it all together by walking us through a well-designed presentation.

While Slides for Students: The Effective Use of Powerpoint in Education looks intimidating with its 300 pages of content, the large font and substantial spacing between lines makes this a quicker read than it initially appears. Having said that, you still will want to take this book one chapter at a time. In editing your current presentations, change one set of elements this term, such as reducing text or moving to more reader-friendly font, and then address another set next term. You don’t have to revise everything today!

*I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review at the request of the publisher.

Some instructors and students like to use a Jeopardy! format to review course content. I’ve learned that it’s not my thing, but I’m happy to support those of you who are into it.

First, you need a Jeopardy! board. I wrote about Jeopardy Labs in 2011, and that is still a solid board creation tool.

Next, you need a way for students to buzz in. The easiest is the free BuzzIn.live website. (Shout out to the developer, Logan Sinclair!)

Visit the BuzzIn.live website and click the “Host” button.

That brings up your host dashboard. Tell your students to use their web-enabled device to visit the BuzzIn.live website. If not all of your students have a web-enabled device or if you’re over the 150-player limit, ask students to work in pairs or small groups so only one person in the group needs a device. They’ll click the “Join” button, enter the 6-digit game code, and enter their name(s) or team name. The limit in this field is 12 characters.

On your dashboard, you’ll see a list of the connected players. This will update automatically as players join. Clicking “Toggle Lock” will lock the room so no more students can join.

By default “sound” is unchecked. In your BuzzIn.live dashboard settings, you can decide whether you want students to be able to turn on their buzzer sound or not.

On your dashboard, click the settings button, then decide whether you want to give students the option to turn on their buzzer sound.

Clicking on the button will remove the buzzer sound option.

Participants who have joined your room will see a big green BUZZ button on their screens.

Ask your question, and students will hit the BUZZ button. That will turn the color of their button to red and it will now read BUZZED.

On your dashboard, you’ll see the players who buzzed in and in what order.

Ask MWashburn to answer the question. If she cannot, move on to AFreud, and so on.

When you’re ready to move to a new question, click the red “Reset ALL Buzzers” button. Everyone’s buzzer will go back to green, and you’re good to go again.

Pro-tip: Since you’ll most likely be showing the questions on your main computer screen, consider using a different device—your own laptop, tablet, phone—to run BuzzIn.live.