TonyTone/Ian Hill/Photologue_NP/ By Aran Levasseur Shakespeare is going digital. Notre Dame professor Elliott Visconsi has co-created a new app for the iPad called The Tempest that he says helps…
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Clever, Catchy, Descriptive? A Forum on Effective Course Naming
I know most of us are worried primarily about the end of the fall semester, but lately the spring has been on my mind as I begin prepping for its courses. I’m pretty sure one of my classes for the spring will not make—there aren’t enough students registered at the moment and the rush of registrants has ended. I think it’s partly a function of being a new faculty member at this institution: students here can access data about teachers’ student evaluations, for instance, but I have none yet by which potential students could evaluate me. But I think it’s also partly my own fault, for trying to be too clever with the course title. It was to be an upper-level, undergraduate seminar, and I tried to give it a title that would speak to its content—in this case, nineteenth-century popular print culture—but in a cheeky, slightly irreverant way. Looking at the course title again, I realize it was probably opaque to students not in the know about the course’s content, particularly if they didn’t read the course description. And we know that many, many students register for courses without reading course descriptions.
We all want to distinguish our courses, particularly upper-level courses that aim to do more than survey a given field. We want to appeal to students, attract those who might not think they’re interested in our topic, and suggest why we find a subject compelling. At some institutions or in some departments, there can be pressure from the administration to attract more students. How have you effectively balanced the need to craft interesting course titles with the need to craft informative course titles? I realize answers may vary widely by field, but I’d love to hear your tips for creating course titles that catch students’ attention while still giving them much-needed context. Please share your tips in the comments!
[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user crimsong19.]
All Things Google: The New Gmail Compose
We’re probably at the point here at ProfHacker where we might not have to tell you that we tend to like all things Google. So I was plenty interested when Gmail rolled out a new interface for writing a few weeks ago that makes it a lot easier to multi-task while writing emails.
In the past, composing email worked in the same way that reading them did: it took up your entire screen. The new writing environment drops a compose window in the lower-right corner of your inbox.
At first, you might be a bit annoyed about the smaller space for writing. And many of the formatting options that you’ve grown used to having right above the compose space in Gmail have been tucked inside different menus. Where, for instance, is the option to add bullet points? How do I CC someone? It turns out the bullets (and most of the other formatting options, including font sizes, indenting and colors) live under the “A.” The option to CC someone appears once you click on recipients.
While it might take you a while to figure out where all of your options now live, the real advantage of the new compose is that you can now move throughout Gmail while composing. Looking at different emails or conversations, running searches, even changing your Gmail settings can all be done while keeping your compose window open. This ability is worth the price of entry alone (and, of course, the price is free). In the past I’ve had to resort to opening multiple Gmail tabs to refer to multiple message threads while writing in a third or fourth window. The new compose more or less gets rid of this problem altogether. If I need a bit more space to read the email, I can minimize the window, and if I want to write while looking at other tabs, I can pop the window out.
And it turns out that all of those hidden features have actually been improved with the addition of keyboard shortcuts. Google tools already supported a number of keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, which I wrote about last year, and which you can see by simply typing “?” once you’ve turned them on. But the new compose supports many more of them. Inserting a bulleted list, for example, is as easy as “CTRL + Shift + 8″ on Windows and “Cmd + Shift + 8″ on a Mac. Adding a CC to an email is “CTRL + Shift + C” on Windows or “Cmd + Shift + C” on a Mac. Neither of these shortcuts was available in the previous compose. And since I like having keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING, this means I love, no, LURVE the new compose.
You can start using the new feature by clicking on “Try out the new compose experience” to the right of the Labels button at the top of the classic compose pane.
If, however, you find that you prefer your old way of writing emails, it’s easy to switch back. Just click the small arrow in the lower-right corner, next to the trash can, and choose “switch back to old compose.”
It took a week or two for me to get used to the new version, but I’ve found the new compose features tremendously helpful in helping me plow through my email. How about you? Are you using the new compose? Let us know what you think in the comments!
Lead photo: Quill / rachaelvoorhees / CC BY-SA 2.0
Tech Tools, Blended Learning and More: ITM’s MindShift Moment
Excited to introduce a collaboration with the creative minds behind the Infinite Thinking Machine. This week, the producers have pulled together an episode featuring some of MindShift’s most…
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Ending Copy / Paste Headaches
It can be hard on occasion to remember that we live in a time when everything is amazing. Computers are, of course, one of the most amazing inventions of the last one hundred years, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t drive you crazy as well.
Perhaps one of the most amazing / crazy-inducing parts of using a computer is copy / paste: ”Wait, you mean I don’t have to retype this entire paragraph that I would like to cite in my article? I can just select some of the text and drop it in? OMG!!!” Copy and paste really does feel magical…until you see how that new piece of text will so often screw up the formatting of the document, email, or blog post you’ve been writing: “WAIT. No, why is the text formatted like that? Why is it in a different font and in bullets that don’t line up with mine! GAH!!! I’ll just retype the whole thing!”
Fortunately, there’s a simple and quick cure for this copy/paste headache. If you’re using Word 2010 on Windows, you can change the default paste options with a quick trip to File –> Options –> Advanced –> Cut, Copy, and Paste. Simply change the “Pasting between documents” setting from “Keep Source Formatting” to “Merge Formatting.”
This setting will largely match your formatting of what you’ve been typing, but preserve the bold, italics, and hyperlinks from your original selection.
But life is even easier if you’re a Mac user. Rather than being limited to ending copy/paste nightmares in Word, there is a global keyboard shortcut. “Paste and Match Style” works across almost all OS X applications that I’ve tried it in. Simply hit Command-Option-Shift-V and your text will now match what you’d previously been typing. If you find that an awkward keyboard shortcut (and it kind of is, four keys and all), remember that you can create or change any keyboard shortcut. So say goodbye to that Courier New getting jumbled up with your bulleted Helvetica!
I recently tweeted my love for this copy/paste shortcut, and reactions suggested that I had uncovered a minor miracle.
Are there other tricks that you use to lower your copy/paste headaches? Do you use a clipboard manager? Let us know in the comments!
EDITED to correct minor phrase error.