Tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

Author Archives: Amy Cavender

Distraction, Productivity, and Being Attentive (aka Regulating Media Use)

March 12, 2010 in Life, Productivity by Amy Cavender

Ever have one of those days at work in which you know you've been busy all day, but you can't quite point to just what you've accomplished? Regulating media use may be worth considering.

Midsemester sanity maintenance

February 26, 2010 in Pedagogy by Amy Cavender

Midsemester is nearly upon us in many places. What are your plans for the midterm week? Frantically trying to maintain some sanity? Giving exams? Mid-term course evaluations?

Got Milk? Using Remember the Milk for Task Management

February 19, 2010 in Productivity, Products, ProfHacker 101 by Amy Cavender

Remember the Milk is a web-based "to-do" list manager that syncs with applications on a variety of smart-phone or pda devices. It can also integrate with GMail and Google Calendar, and it’s possible to add tasks to it using QuickSilver or Twitter. This post covers how to use RTM to remember and keep track of all your tasks.

All Things Google: Using Filters to Manage Your Inbox

February 12, 2010 in Productivity by Amy Cavender

Dealing with email overload can be a daunting task. Using filters to prevent some messages from ever reaching the inbox can help reduce the clutter, and get us one step closer to Inbox Zero.

The Balancing Act

February 5, 2010 in Life by Amy Cavender

Balance? In academic life? What's that?

Ah, Wikipedia!

January 29, 2010 in Pedagogy by Amy Cavender

Yes, Wikipedia has its problems. No resource is perfect, after all. But it's a tool that we should teach students to use appropriately, not something we should be steering them away from.

Maintaining Sanity and Security: Why Use a Password Manager?

January 22, 2010 in Productivity, Products by Amy Cavender

We all know we should keep secure passwords, but a lot of us don't. Maybe we're afraid we won't remember a password that's really secure, and writing it on a post-it note we keep in our desk drawer kind of defeats the purpose of having a secure password in the first place. A password manager can help.

Tools for managing multiple class blogs

December 23, 2009 in Pedagogy by Amy Cavender

Moving away from a full-blown CMS for your courses and using blogs instead? In this post, you'll find a brief discussion of tools that can be very helpful for managing multiple course blogs without going crazy.

Using a Blog to Run Your Courses? Why You Might Consider WPMU.

December 11, 2009 in Pedagogy, Products by Amy Cavender

You're thinking of using a blog in conjunction with your courses, and you like what you see in the WordPress platform. Do you go with WordPress, or with WordPress MU?

All Things Google: Using Google Reader to Streamline Your Reading

December 4, 2009 in Productivity by Amy Cavender

Many of us read a lot of blogs, and keeping up can take a lot of time. Google Reader can help us streamline our reading and keep track of important information.

All Things Google: Lost a paper you wrote? GMail to the rescue!

November 24, 2009 in How-To by Amy Cavender

It's late. You're trying to finish a project, and you recall that a previous conference paper you wrote contains some passages that would be helpful. The problem is, you don't have the original, and the only version available to you is a protected PDF. Now what? If you're a GMail user, you might be in luck.

ProfHacker 101: Getting started with Zotero, Part 2

November 20, 2009 in How-To, ProfHacker 101 by Amy Cavender

Zotero's a great reference manager and writing tool. But it's also a great tool for collaboration, and it can automatically back up your library and notes for you. In this second part of ProfHacker's introduction to Zotero, I give a quick overview of Zotero groups and synchronization.