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As frequent readers of this blog know, I’m a fan of everyone who has the skill to create scripts that make Canvas better. This post will feature another James Jones script (thank you, James!). Like other scripts, this one uses the Tampermonkey add-on for your browser. If you don’t yet have Tampermonkey installed, visit the Tampermonkey website and click the first download button, not the beta version. What the “add color course border” script does Since all Canvas courses look the same, it can be hard to tell at first glance which course you are in. The “add color course border” script provides a handyRead More →

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Is all of that bland text in your LMS starting to get to you? Do you wish you could jazz it up a bit? As far as web browsers are concerned, emojis and Unicode symbols are the same as text. This is module view in one of my Canvas courses. I put suns on either end of an announcement title, a red exclamation point and a blue-boxed 1 in the titles of modules, and a gold star in a text header. Once you fine Unicode/emojis you like, copy the image. Go to your LMS. Edit the text, and paste the image. Save. Done! Be aware,Read More →

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Each of us sees color differently. Download the free Color Blind Pal app to your phone or tablet. Open the app, tap “inspecting color” to change it to “filtering colors,” then tap the at the top of the screen. If it is difficult for you to see the color differences in the pie chart below, under “color blindness type” select your form of color blindness and click the ← at the top of the screen. Point your camera at this pie chart to see the colors shifted making the colors easier to tell apart.         If you have typical color vision, underRead 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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Did you know that when you crop images in MS Word, PowerPoint, etc., the full image is still there? Anyone who has a copy of your file can restore the image back to the original. This is especially problematic if you frequently crop after doing a print-screen. Do you remember what was in the background that you just cropped? A sensitive email? Student grades? Your credit card information? Fortunately, you can ask MS Office to delete the cropped areas of your images, but you do have to ask. For each image. In, for example, a Word file, click on the image, select the Format tab,Read More →

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It’s time to clean up the graphics you use in your presentations or on your website/course management system. Remove the content you don’t want; only keep what you do want. Clipping Magic makes it about as easy as you can imagine for removing content, say, the background, from photos. Drag and drop the photo you want to edit. Mark green for what you want to keep. Mark red for what you want deleted. Zoom in or use a smaller brush size to get in the corners. You can change the background. I’ve chosen transparent for my example, but you can choose from a small paletteRead More →

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Like having different wallpapers for your desktop? I have 110 different images that change every 15 minutes on both my work and personal laptops. (You’re right. This has nothing to do with teaching. But it is fun.) Here’s one. How to do it Create an account at Desktoppr. During the registration process give Desktoppr permission to access your Dropbox.com account. (Don’t have a Dropbox account yet? Sign up here.) Desktoppr will add an “Apps” folder to Dropbox if you don’t already have one. Inside of that folder it will add another folder called “Desktoppr” where it will sync the wallpapers you select. I filter byRead More →

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Today’s Faculty Focus article is on using mind maps to get students to engage with the course material. While the author recommends using a large sheet of a paper, I would ask faculty to consider pointing their students to SpiderScribe.net. Earlier this year I wrote about SpiderScribe. (See this blog post.) It has a very short learning curve, and with the ability to include text, images, URLs, and documents, the maps that students create could be very powerful study aids. Using the share feature, students could work in pairs or groups to create the maps. No need to print them off. Students can add theirRead More →

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In my last post, I mentioned I was at the Pacific Northwest Assessment, Teaching, and Learning Conference. After my presentation someone asked me about concept mapping tools. (I wish I could remember who he was. He was very tall. If you happen to be reading this, can you send me an email, please?) I told him that I had recently read about a tool but I couldn’t remember in that moment what it was. I’m afraid I still can’t remember what it was, but just a few days ago Richard Byrne of the Free Technology for Teachers blog wrote about the newly-released Spider Scribe. IRead More →

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[UPDATE 12/12/2012  : Bad news.  JoliPrint is shutting down effective January 4, 2012. Use PrintFriendly.com instead.] Find an article online that you’d like to print out for your class for discussion that day? JoliPrint takes the webpage content and turns it into an uncluttered PDF. Here I’ve taken my post on colorizing Windows folders and turned it into a PDF. Pretty, isn’t it? A couple things to note. The date and time are included at the top of the page. That’s the time in Paris where one of the company’s offices is located. At the bottom of the page is the website’s URL. In theRead More →