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I was honored earlier this month to be a guest on a podcast on teaching hosted by Elizabeth Yost Hammer, director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development (CAT+FD) at Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA). The topic was – no surprise – technology for teaching and learning. When you have 40 minutes to kill, give it a listen. Elizabeth and I have been friends for years, and she knows that I read a lot of non-fiction. The podcast ends with Elizabeth asking about my three favorite books from 2017. Because of time limitations, I was limited to three – although IRead More →

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When we moved from standing in the library making Xerox copies of journal articles to downloading pdfs from a database, it seemed like an awesome development. Until we realized that marking up pdfs digitally is not easy. I would not be surprised if you told me that you print your pdfs. Here I will show you Mendeley Desktop for Windows. There are also desktop versions for Mac and Linux. Mendeley’s web interface will keep all of your content synched across your computers. What does Mendeley do? Indexing Pdfs live on your computer wherever you want them to live. Mendeley acts as an indexer. Drag andRead More →

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This functionality is now native to Canvas. ************ After I copy my current course into my Canvas course shell for next term, I have to adjust all of the due dates. Going into each assignment and changing the date is tedious. And if you’ve been reading my blog, you know I hate tedium. Why can’t I see all of the due dates on one page and change them there? Here is a big time shout out to James Jones of Richland Community College for creating a mechanism that does just that. [And a shout out to Marc Lentini of Highline College for pointing me toRead More →

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When presenting, I sometimes want to show something on my screen that is small. In Chrome, I can zoom in with CTRL + [plus sign], zoom out with CTRL + [minus sign], and return to normal with CTRL + [zero]. If it’s text I’m showing in Word, I can zoom in using the zoom slider in the bottom right corner. If I want to show, say, the Word toolbar ribbon, I have to use something else to magnify it. This is also for anyone who has said something like, “I know you can’t read what’s on this PowerPoint slide, but…” Windows Magnifier is likely alreadyRead More →

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In Windows, the built-in clipboard can only hold one item. That means the next time you copy a chunk of text, the previous chunk of text that you had copied is erased. When grading assignments, I find that what I write for one student often applies to other students. I know that some of you handle this by having, say, a Word file that holds all of your common comments. But what if I told you that there is an easier (and free!) way? Ditto saves the last 500 (or however many you want) instances of whatever you’ve copied, such as text, images, files. IRead More →

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I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts – any shortcuts, really. I want to spend less time running my computer and more time doing what needs to get done. For Windows users, hold down the Windows key and press S. Your cursor will jump down to the Windows search box. Type in what you’re looking for, and you’re in business. MaxLauncher ups your search and launch game. Use a keyboard shortcut to run MaxLauncher (I use CTRL – ‘), and then press a key on your keyboard to run a program, open a folder, or open a file. I have my programs on the firstRead More →

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I’ve been doing a lot more small group work in my courses. When I let students choose their own groups, they tend to gravitate to the people they know best. That means that they frequently get the same perspective over and over again. I decided to assign students to groups, but counting off in class is a bit of a pain – students get all settled in their seats, they count off, and then they have to pick up all of their gear and move. And I suspect there’s the occasional (frequent) trading of groups since I don’t remember who said which number. Sumit BansalRead More →

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Let me explain. Have you ever entered information in a web form, like a long, well-crafted comment you’ve written for a student in your course management system? And then when you clicked “submit” you got a notice that your page had timed out, or that you lost your internet connection? Or maybe you didn’t get around to clicking submit before you accidentally closed or reloaded the webpage? In any case, your comment is gone. Irreparably gone. And you have to type it all over again. Or what you can remember of it. In case, you’re certain the words you are retyping are not nearly asRead More →

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Do you need to keep track of receipts for reimbursement or for your taxes? Danae Hudson and Brooke Whisenhunt of Missouri State University recommend Expensify. Expensify is free. If you need more power, you can pay a small monthly fee. In the past I’ve used CamScanner to turn my phone’s camera into a scanner, scanning my receipts to pdf and then uploading the pdf to Dropbox for safekeeping. Expensify uses the same technology, but to a very specific end. I should also add that those of you with flip phones are not left out. The web interface for Expensify works just fine. Use whatever scannerRead More →