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I’ve left Firefox. It was using up a massive amount of RAM (Firefox 6) and had slowed to a crawl. I started looking at my add-ons to see what might be slowing it down as I did with previous iterations of Firefox. And then I stopped. I thought, “Using a web browser shouldn’t be this hard.” I had tried Chrome before, but I had Firefox set up exactly as I wanted with the add-ons that I wanted. Then the scales tipped. I didn’t have many add-ons left that worked, and Chrome had many more add-ons available. I’ve been happily, and speedily, cruising the web withRead More →

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Feeling harried?  The latest edition of Faculty Focus encourages you to take back your time. We know that humans don’t multitask.  Instead, we switch from one task to another, and in the process we lose time during that switch as we try to refocus.  The author suggests scheduling “like with like”.  Do similar tasks together to minimize losing time to refocus. The author also suggests scheduling your tasks.  Block time off in your calendar to get stuff done.  During that time, focus on that task.  Sometimes we get so caught up in being available for our students we forget to take care of ourselves. It’sRead More →

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There’s a lot to be said for a good old-fashioned email list. One address emails a bunch of people. Fiesta.cc makes it easy to create an email list and makes it easy to manage it. I use an email list for each of my classes. I live inside of my email, so it’s easy for me to send an email to all the students in a class, and easy for them to respond. While most course management systems have the same functionality, you have to log into it to send an email. The email list software I have been using is hosted by my college,Read More →

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One of the nice things about living in a digital world is the amount of contact we can have with other people via email. Of course that’s one of the bad things about living in a digital world as well. How much of your work day is spent writing, reading, filing, deleting, or searching for email? In previous posts, I’ve suggested some tools that can help with this (see Subtextual, SimplyFile, Phrase Express, Xobni). In this post I want to talk about some of the built-in power that comes with Outlook. Specifically, I’m going to talk about how to set up rules so that atRead More →

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For those who worry about being misunderstood in email, how about video recording your message instead? The cleverly named Eyejot provides an easy web-based user interface for recording and emailing video. They also provide a bookmarklet, a small program that runs inside your web browser, for attaching your own video commentary to web pages. Their bookmarklet is called “Eyejot This!” You just drag the bookmark to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Surf to any website, click the “Eyejot This!” bookmark. This window will appear – with your face on the screen, if your webcam is working. Hopefully you won’t see my face on your screen. ThatRead More →

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When you stay at a hotel, do you remember how you used to request a wake-up call? Actually, maybe you still do that. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get a wake-up call for stuff you need to do? And that’s why I’m excited about NudgeMail, a company that just launched this fall. NudgeMail lets you send reminders to yourself at whatever future date or time you choose. No registration. No login. No software to download. No complicated commands to remember. They really couldn’t have made this any easier. Let’s say that I have an email exchange with you where we discuss working onRead More →

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It’s been a few months since I posted, and I’m emerging from my technology sabbatical. Fall quarter is in full-swing; it’s time to share what’s new. It’s often the day-to-day kinds of activities where a little change can make a big difference. My focus in this post will be changing a default setting in Outlook that affects the order in which Outlook shows you messages. Outlook assumes that you want to start reading the most recent message first. After deleting or filing the first message, Outlook takes you to an earlier message. But that’s not how I read my messages. I start with the earliestRead 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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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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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 →