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

Category Archives: ProfHacker 101

We’d like to see a change in the way digital tools are currently being used in higher education. This category is for posts that can help push that change. These posts are intended to encourage individuals to teach themselves and others how to use digital tools with help from their peers…and from ProfHacker.com of course! For more about this category, read our “ProfHacker 101″ Manifesto.

Scheduling 101: Using Acuity for Student Appointments

February 24, 2010 in ProfHacker 101 by Prof. Hacker

Guest author Todd Stanfield explains how to use Acuity Scheduling to simplify the process of scheduling appointments with students.

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.

Scheduling 101: The Ideal Academic App

February 11, 2010 in Productivity, ProfHacker 101 by George H. Williams

Today I’d like to brainstorm with ProfHacker readers about what the ideal academic scheduling service or app might look like. I’ve taken the various comments that ProfHacker readers have shared over the last few months and combined them with some ideas of my own. So consider this an open letter of sorts.

Scheduling 101: Using Tungle.me for Committee Meetings and Student Appointments

February 1, 2010 in How-To, ProfHacker 101 by George H. Williams

Since using scheduling & calendaring services Doodle and Jiffle, I’ve learned about Tungle. Conclusion? It combines the best features of the other two and offers some features they don’t, making it the best choice of the three for academics (though it’s not without drawbacks). In this post I explain why.

Managing Facebook Privacy Settings (round 2)

December 11, 2009 in How-To, ProfHacker 101 by Julie Meloni

Facebook once again announced a change to their service, this time asking all 350 million of its users to personalize their privacy settings. But what does that really mean, and what are they really pushing you to do?

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.

3 “Must Have” Bookmarklets

November 18, 2009 in How-To, ProfHacker 101 by George H. Williams

Sometimes it’s the simplest tool that can be the most useful. There are 3 bookmarklets that are essential, easy-to-use additions for your web browser. And what’s great is that they’ll work with just about any browser on any platform.

ProfHacker 101: Getting started with Zotero

November 13, 2009 in How-To, ProfHacker 101 by Amy Cavender

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written quite a bit about organization. In addition to course materials and materials for our dossiers, we need to keep good track of our research materials and notes. A number of commercial tools exist for this purpose. This post discusses an open-source alternative.

How to find free, online content that you’re allowed to re-use

November 10, 2009 in How-To, ProfHacker 101 by George H. Williams

A couple of weeks ago, Jason explained how ProfHacker finds most of the images that we use on this site. As you might imagine, images are only one sort of digital content available online with Creative Commons licenses: one can also find CC-licensed audio, video, and text documents of various kinds. “Exactly how,” you may well ask, “does one find this wealth of materials?” I’m glad that you asked because I’m about to explain just that.

Find the Settings Link

Managing Facebook Privacy Settings

October 26, 2009 in How-To, ProfHacker 101 by Julie Meloni

A reader recently asked: “Could ProfHacker do a piece on how to manage Facebook accounts so that I could remember how to keep my privacy settings up to date? I keep losing track of how to shield chat and newsfeed.” Here’s my long-winded response.

Scheduling 101: Using Jiffle for Student Appointments

October 23, 2009 in How-To, Pedagogy, ProfHacker 101 by George H. Williams

In yesterday’s post about scheduling appointments with students, I demonstrated how to use Doodle to avoid the drawbacks of a paper or whiteboard signup system. Then Wendy left a comment suggesting that I try out Jiffle, and so I did… The result? So long, Doodle!

Scheduling 101: Using Doodle for Student Appointments

October 22, 2009 in How-To, Pedagogy, ProfHacker 101 by George H. Williams

On my campus it’s time for academic advisement, meaning all the students will be looking to make appointments with their adviser in order to discuss what courses to take next semester. This is one of those times when I’m glad that tools like Doodle.com exist, because such tools make it so easy to schedule all of these appointments.