Productivity (Page 12)

For those of you who have taken the Dropbox plunge, if you signed up with your edu email account Dropbox wants to double the space you get from referrals. That’s now 500MB per referral. And it’s retroactive. That’s right. They’ll double the extra space you’ve already received from referrals. Just visit this webpage and confirm your email address. Your space will be automatically increased. If you’re not a Dropbox user, it’s time to sign up. Not familiar with Dropbox? See this earlier blog post. How do you get space for referrals? Log into your Dropbox.com account, and click on the “Referral Status” tab. At theRead More →

As my regular readers know, I’m a big fan of Dropbox (see this earlier post). Dropbox adds a new folder to your ‘My Documents’ folder called ‘My Dropbox.’ Let’s say that you’ve created a folder in ‘My Documents’ called ‘Important Committee.’ Inside that folder are several other folders. Let’s say one of them is called ‘Stuff to Share.’ You want to share this folder with your fellow committee members for coordinating the work of your committee. But you don’t want to move your entire committee folder to Dropbox, and you don’t want to pull that one subfolder out; you like to keep your files neatlyRead More →

In December 2010 I wrote a post about Corkboard, a virtual bulletin board. They just announced some new features. You’re welcome to play around with this live board. If you have frequently-changing content for your students, it would be easy enough to embed a corkboard in your website or course management system (CMS), and just update the sticky notes as needed. No need to edit your website or CMS. Have other uses for it? Leave a comment!Read More →

I’m a Firefox user, mostly because of the add-ons. These are my favorites. Colorful Tabs. I typically have 5-10 tabs open at one time. Having them colorized help me pick them out quickly. The tab I’m currently on is brighter than the others and the page title is bolded. The add-on comes with the ability to customize in many different ways. For example, you can have Colorful Tabs generate colors at random, but you can also specify certain colors for certain domains. For example, my Google Reader tab is always aqua. Delicious Bookmarks. As a Delicious user I’m frequently bookmarking interesting websites. With this add-on,Read More →

Whatever your motivation, switching from grading by hand to grading electronically may take a little extra time until you get down a system that works for you, but it’s worth it. Students use less paper. I write more comments since they’re not constrained by margin size, and my comments are legible. Having electronic copies of student work is handy when a year or two later a student asks for a letter of recommendation.  Students submit assignments. Decide if you want files sent in a particular file format. MS Word can handle most formats, but if you want to be cautious accept just doc, docx, andRead More →

Is your computer desktop cluttered with icons? Having trouble sorting through them? I recently read one of those blog posts (Digital Inspiration) that makes you go, “I can’t believe that never occurred to me.” I changed my desktop wallpaper to this minimalist image of a desk and bookcase, then arranged my icons on the bookcase. How cool is that? (Thanks to Digital Inspiration for the suggestion of putting the computer and recycling bin with the desk.) Visit this website to get the image. Right click on it and select “Set as Desktop Background.” Then go to your desktop, right click on any empty space. UnderRead More →