“Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.…
Author: Stacy Reardon
Posting to SPARK? Try PDFs.
What’s the best way to post files on SPARK? To minimize confusion (and student emails), we recommend converting Word documents and PowerPoint presentations to PDF before posting on SPARK. PDFs usually open right in the SPARK browser window, and most students already have a free version of Adobe Reader. In contrast, students must first download…
SPARK Community of Practice: Strategies for Using SPARK in Large Classes
Topic: Using SPARK in Large Lecture Courses Last month, about 15 SPARK users –new and veteran– gathered to enjoy lunch and share strategies for using technology to manage large lecture classes. Presenting were Dan Gerber from the School of Public Health, and John Gerber from the Department of Plant, Soil, and Insect Sciences. Both instructors…
Downloading Your Roster
Summer’s here, and you may have started (tentatively!) thinking about next semester’s classes. If you use or have thought about using Excel to manage your student grades, then one of your biggest problems may be figuring out how to enter student data into a spreadsheet without typing in every last student name and ID number…
Creating a Writing Network through Twitter
In his TeachOIT post “Twitter: What’s the Point?“, Tony explained a few ways Twitter has been useful to him both socially and professionally. I’d like to add a further way that Twitter has improved my academic life. As a graduate student, finding the motivation to do academic writing can be…elusive at times. Many doctoral candidates…
Mac Tips: Hot Corners
Make the corners of your Mac screen work for you! Customize your Mac’s “Hot Corners” to allow you to quickly engage useful desktop commands by moving the cursor into the corners of your computer screen. These moves parallel some of the function commands discussed in our post, Mac Tips: Driving Around the Desktop. While function…
Taking the Mystery out of RSS
In a perfect world, updates from all your favorite news websites and blogs would appear instantly in one place, ready for you to access. You wouldn’t have to hunt. It would be like getting your meals delivered from the best restaurants in town, everyday. I’ve often wished for just such a service. And then I…
Mac Tips: Screenshots
Taking pictures of your desktop is as easy as pressing Command, Shift, 3. In your Mac, you can take a picture of your entire desktop or just a selection. This is useful if you would like to provide illustrated instructions for your students or for class presentations. Command+Shift+3: captures the entire desktop. Command+Shift+4: gives you a cross-hair…
Mac Tips: Getting More Desktop with Spaces
If you sometimes feel that your desktop is too cluttered, or if you wish you had another computer screen to separate work from play, Mac’s “Spaces” feature delivers–without spending a dime on a second monitor. The Spaces feature allows you to shuttle between as few as 2 and as many as 16 desktops screens all…
Mac Tips: Driving around the Desktop
The latest Mac operating system (Mac OS X) comes with a few quick tricks that will streamline your computing experience. We’ll deliver a few of these tricks in a series of posts called “Mac Tips.” You can always find these tips and a lot more under the “Technology Survival Guide” Category. They’re also quite cool:…
SPARK Focus Group Findings
If you have opinions about SPARK, the University’s online learning management system, OIT wants to hear them. Over Spring Break, Academic Computing hosted a SPARK Focus Group to receive feedback from professors currently using SPARK in their courses. Here’s what we wanted to find out: Why do faculty use SPARK and how does it enrich…