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Zoom has new question options available on in the latest version 5.8.3. This version is not an automatic update, so you’ll need to download it manually. Account owners and admins can enable advanced polling to allow meeting hosts to build advanced polls or quizzes that contain multiple question/answer types, allow for images, and automatically record answers. New question/answer types include match combinations, rank answers, and fill in the blank. This feature requires version 5.8.3 or higher and currently must be enabled by Zoom. (https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201361953) But big caveat: “Users using older versions of Zoom will not be able to participate in polls with new question typesRead More →

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Faculty seem to always be thinking about the best way to communicate with our students. While most academics still live inside of our email, most of our students do not. Some instructors use Remind or Slack to message their students, and both are good solutions. Both also require students to install an app on their device, and then a bit of instruction on how to use it. As we’re about to start a new quarter here in the Pacific Northwest—a quarter that will be entirely online—the question of how best to contact students has risen to greater importance. A special shout out to my colleagueRead More →

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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 toRead More →

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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, suchRead More →

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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. CourseHero.com 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 eachRead More →

Windows 10 emoji menu

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Windows 10* has a built-in emoji menu. Go into any program where you can type, like Word or a new email message. Press Windows key + semicolon. Choose an emoji from the menu. The first page (clock icon) shows your most recently used emoji. The magnifying glass is for search. Type what you’re looking for, like “smile.” You’ll see all of the emoji tagged with that word. Click on the other icons to browse emoji by categories. To close the menu, click the X in the top right corner, press the ESC key, or click anywhere that is not the menu. Choose a skin toneRead 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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The fall 2017 Windows 10 update brings with it an emoji menu, and it’s only accessible via a keyboard shortcut. Windows key (WIN) + semicolon or WIN + period will call it up. Click on the emoji you want to select it. Click on the magnifying glass to search. Click on the other menu icons to browse by category. The clock icon will initially show seemingly randomly selected emoji – and they very well may be. Once you start using them, this menu will show your most recently used emoji. On the people tab, there is a little box in the upper right corner. ClickRead More →

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We have been talking a lot at my college about accessibility. Are our videos captioned? Do our webpages and document images have alt-text that can be read by screen readers? In that vein, I have been thinking about OCR – optical character recognition. Here is an image. It’s just a quick screenshot of text from a previous blog post. I added some alt-text to the image. A screen reader would come to this image and read the alt-text. For the curious, the alt-text is “Image of text from a previous blog post,” and you may even be able to read that text by mousing overRead More →

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If you’ve been around this blog for a while, you may be a long-time user of Doodle for helping you and others find a good meeting time. But did you know that you can also use Doodle to help make a choice? Yesterday a friend, who is one of my college’s awesome librarians, wrote to say that she works with an instructor who has her students read books related to the course content and then report on what they learned from the book later in the course. The instructor has worked with our librarians to identify a lengthy list of titles, and she doesn’t wantRead More →