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I first wrote about PhraseExpress in 2009. My new policy: if I’m still using a particular technology 10 years later, it deserves a new blog post. PhraseExpress is a text expander (and more) for Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone. The reviews for the mobile versions are mixed, so I’m going to limit the post to Windows. (Mac functionality is similar, I just don’t have a Mac.) PhraseExpress is free for non-commercial use. The pay-for upgrades give you more functionality that may or may not be useful to you. They’re a one-time fee – not annual subscription – for that version. For significant version upgrades whichRead More →

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In my last post, I wrote about how I use the news feed reader Inoreader to keep up with what’s new. I promised at the end of that post to write about how I use Inoreader in combination with the free task management tool Trello to track the content I want to add to my psychology courses the following term. This is my Trello board as it currently stands for my Psych 100: General Psychology course. (Create as many Trello boards as you have courses.) Notice that I have a list for changes I want to make to my “Syllabus and Canvas quiz” (currently empty),Read More →

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In addition to keeping up with what’s new in technology, I keep an eye out for content that is particularly relevant to my psychology students. Rather than dig through the Internet for content, I have Inoreader fetch the content for me. This is what Inoreader looks like. On the left, under “Subscriptions,” you can see some of the content I’m subscribed to. Inoreader periodically visits these websites looking for something new. When Inoreader finds new content, it drops it in here. You can see that I have a “News” folder that contains a subscription called “NYT > Most Shared.” These are articles the New YorkRead More →

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A lot of new tech stuff I learn is too often due to me making a bone-headed decision. In this case, I created an Excel file to look at some data. Thinking I had everything I needed, I closed the file without saving it. Not two minutes later it occurred to me that I wasn’t done with it. I didn’t especially want to enter the data again. Granted, it probably didn’t take me more than 10 minutes to enter that data, but there were other things I could do with those 10 minutes — like write a blog post about how I learned how toRead More →

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Do you know the most common way I learn about new technology? Something starts bugging me, and I go looking for a solution. Today’s problem? If I want to keep my existing Chrome tabs open, to open a bookmark in a new tab, I have to open a new tab and then click on the bookmark. I know. In the greater scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal. But I’ve done it a lot today. I mean, a lot. So, it’s time to learn something new. A pretty quick search gave me the answer. The solution(s) Hold down CTRL and left-click on the bookmarkRead More →

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A veteran colleague recently advised a newly-hired professor to not send students email at 1 am. Why? Because students will come to expect that all of their professors will respond to their email inquiries at 1 am. I don’t know if that’s true, but another colleague replies to messages late at night but delays sending them until the morning for that very reason. Outlook comes with the ability to delay sending emails. Gmail can do it with an add-in. Gmail users: Install Boomerang. (Try the pro version for free for 30 days. After that, use the pared-down free version or pay $4.99/month for more features.)Read More →

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We are leaving in a couple days to visit my father-in-law. I want to work while on this trip, including getting my online courses ready for the fall*. Now that I routinely work with three monitors, the thought of trying to ready my courses with only my Windows laptop monitor made me a little twitchy. I travel with a small Android tablet, so surely there must be an easy way to extend my Windows laptop to that tablet as a second screen – easier that the software I used a few years ago. And there is. Spacedesk is free. Your Windows computer will be yourRead More →

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Have you had this experience? You’re reading a student’s paper, and your internal plagiarism detector starts setting off alarms. The prose sounds different than anything else the student has written. You start googling phrases – and nothing comes up. Using Turnitin? That probably won’t catch it either (Rogerson & McCarthy, 2017). Your student may have used one of the many freely available “paraphrasing tools.” Here is the first paragraph from a recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018). Learning to read transforms lives. Reading is the basis for the acquisition of knowledge, for cultural engagement, for democracy, andRead More →

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It didn’t take long. I found a replacement for Beanote, the Chrome extension I wrote about in my last blog post. Hypothes.is has more power and more flexibility. Add to any webpage a personal note just for yourself, a note for your group, or a public note that can be seen by anyone running Hypothes.is Several of us at my college are working on editing pages that explain to faculty how to get a video captioned. Using Hypothes.is we can leave notes on each webpage that everyone else in our group can see. This is much easier than taking screenshots and emailing them to eachRead More →

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Sometimes I want to add a note to a webpage. Beanote is a Chrome browser extension that will let me do that. When I give my tech tools presentation, I discuss LastPass, for example. I don’t always remember all of the LastPass features I want to talk about, so I’m going to add a Beanote “sticker note” listing those features on the LastPass homepage. Anytime I visit that page with my Chrome browser, that note will be there. I’ve highlighted the sentence “LastPass remembers all your passwords, so you don’t have to.” You can see the 3-icon Beanote toolbar. The first icon is a highlighter.Read More →

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