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The “Type here to search” box in the lower left corner of Windows 10 is handy for searching all kinds of things. Except the Internet. Windows forces you to use their Bing search engine inside of their Edge browser. But I’d rather use Firefox as my browser and use Shortmarks (see this blog post) as my search engine. Thanks to the $1.99 Search Deflector available from the Microsoft Store, now I can. [Shout out to Ashwin at ghacks.net!] (There is an identical free version available via GitHub, but for such a useful tool, I’m happy to pony up a couple bucks.) After installing and runningRead More →

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This is a mishmash of stuff that I’ve been collecting. Enjoy! Be kind to your eyes: 20-20-20. We are all spending way more time in front of our computers than we did, say, in February 2020. I’ve heard from colleagues who have been struggling with eye strain, so I know I’m not alone. Be kind to your eyes and follow the ophthalmologist-recommended 20-20-20 rule. Every 20 minutes look at something 20+ feet away for 20+ seconds. The trick is in remembering to look away every 20 minutes. I use the “Tomato Clock” browser extension (Chrome/Firefox). Barring that, you know how to set an alarm onRead More →

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I taught my first online course in the late 1990s. I had done my homework, reading up on everything I could find about teaching online, attending conference sessions about teaching online. While the Internet was out of its infancy, it was still in toddlerhood, so there wasn’t a ton of information out there about teaching online. For that matter, there wasn’t a ton of information about the Internet itself. Some time in the mid-1990s, my wife, who was a reference librarian at the time, had a file folder labeled “Internet.” That pretty much sums up how little information there was. Anyway, I learned everything IRead More →

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My college has been with the Canvas learning management system for a few years now. There are many things I like about it, but the cumbersome number of clicks it takes to delete a bunch of pages is not one of them. And I wanted to delete a bunch of pages. We recently turned on “Atomic Search” within Canvas that allows instructors and students to search within a course. If a page is published, it’s fair game to be returned in search results. As I copied courses from quarter to quarter to quarter, I never had to worry about those unused pages. They weren’t linkedRead More →

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When someone knocks on your office door, you may have a sensitive email or student work on your screen. Rather than figuring out if what is on your screen can be safely seen, use a keyboard shortcut to minimize everything so only your desktop shows. Windows Windows key + D (“D” is for desktop). When your visitor leaves, that same key combination will bring back everything where it was. Mac Command + F3 (“F3” is for F3). When your visitor leaves, that same key combination or just F3 will bring back everything where it was.  Read More →

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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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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 →

Spacedesk logo

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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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Recently, I gave a presentation on academic technology at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development at Xavier University of Louisiana. One of my favorite tools to show is Mendeley, a pdf manager with a very nifty MS Word interface for references (see this blog post). During my presentation, I created a Word document, entered some in-text citations via Mendeley, and then clicked “Insert Bibliography,” and like magic, the full list of references for all of those in-text citations appeared. And then I showed how you can quickly switch from, say, APA style to Chicago and back again. A sharp-eyed participant (whoRead More →