Teaching any large course inevitably creates an influx of email. Sorting through those messages takes much longer when students don’t provide complete information. Consider sharing some of email these tips with your own students, inspired by Professor Michael Leddy’s guidelines you can find here.) Use your official University email address. This can make determining who you are significantly easier to…
Category: Technology Survival Guide
TeachOIT Podcast #3: UDrive and UMass Blogs
In the second of our two-part podcast series “Catching Up with Emerging Technologies” Tony and Fred discuss two OIT services: the online file storage tool UDrive, and the Blogs at UMass Amherst service. What are the best ways to use these tools and how are instructors using them? Listen and find out! Learn more: UDrive: easy-to-use,…
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…
TeachOIT Podcast #2: Social Bookmarking with Delicious
In the first of our two-part series “Catching Up with Emerging Technologies” Tony and Fred discuss the social bookmarking tool Delicious. Why should you care about social bookmarking? Listen and find out! TeachOIT Podcast #2: Social Bookmarking (10 minutes) Podcast Opening/Closing music is “The Future Soon” by Jonathan Coulton, used under a Creative Commons…
Designing A Hybrid Course: Tips for Making it Work
This is our second post based on a presentation given by Pamela Trafford last month (read the first post here) on using web tools to deliver content for face-to-race courses. Pamela Trafford is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management, and seasoned veteran of online teaching. Strategies for Making it Work Using SPARK in ways that will improve the…
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…
Tips for Managing Email: Staying under Quota
The added challenge of keeping up with email is not just keeping up with the never-ending stream of information but also keeping your email safely under your quota such that you can continue to receive email. Keeping your inbox under control can be more than just keeping your email working, but keeping your inbox free of clutter makes…
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…
Tips for Managing Email: Keeping Up
Keeping up with email is one of the demons of the modern world. I’ve seen enough faculty check their UMass email to see that most folks have thousands of messages in their inboxes with possibly hundreds of unread messages. Most faculty have many other things that keep them pretty busy (read: teaching and research) is…
Tracking Visitors to your Blog with Google Analyitcs
If you’ve set up a UMass Blog to document your research or teaching, you might be interested to know who your visitors are. The days of the simple hit counter are gone, replaced with Google Analytics, a Google tool that tracks a wealth of data about where your visitors are coming from, which sections of your blog they are reading, and…
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:…