Brent Warner 0:00
What are some quick and easy tips to make your work life a little smoother? We’ve got the 12 tips of Techmas to help you out. This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season 6, Episode 10.

Tim Van Norman 0:25
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech podcast . I’m Tim Van Norman, the Instructional Technologist at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:34
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:41
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. Last show of 2020, 24

Brent Warner 0:47
Wow. Alright, so, Tim, we set ourselves a challenge to keep this episode short for everybody listening. We’re going to try to keep the whole thing under 15 minutes. And I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do it, but we’re going to give it a try. So we’re going for 12 tips that hopefully are just a little bit useful. If any one of these is useful, then I hope that your, your 15 minutes is well spent here, absolutely. So Tim, you ready to jump right in?

Tim Van Norman 1:13
Yeah, let’s do it. Alright. So this, this is a tradition that we’ve often done, is something like this to Christmas time, although we haven’t tried the 15 minute part, new challenge there, but we try to give tips, try to talk about some stuff you can do over break or whatever. But in this case, this is more, I hope, useful tips. So I’m going to start off and talk a little bit about Windows 11. And what some people really don’t like is the menu bar at the bottom. It shows up in the middle of Windows 11. It’s always been on the left, but you can go into your settings and you can change it and tell it to the task bar to have that menu. The menu show up on the left if you want to.

Brent Warner 1:56
That is great. Actually, I did that recently because we’re we are now rolling out windows 11 on campus. I took advantage of that. I searched it almost immediately. I’m like, get me out of this mess. Good. All right, on my turn. So Google Docs. When you leave comments for students on Google docs on the sidebar right, it feels like there’s no option for customization of the fonts like a rich text editor, which might be nice, because if you use all caps, it seems like you’re like yelling at the student, right? But you can actually bold and italicize comments inside of there. So if you put the stars, you know, the the asterisk button, on the two sides of a word, that will bold it, and if you put the underscores on two sides of a word, it will italicize it so, so at least you can get a little bit of like emphasis on your words as you’re typing them in there.

Tim Van Norman 2:50
Nice, I haven’t tried that. I’m gonna take a look at that. Nice, yeah, that’s great. So another Windows, 11. I’m gonna put two together because they’re really close in Windows 11. One of the cool things is, if you move your mouse up to the maximize button in the middle, you know you’ve got the minimize, maximize and the close button in the upper right of your window, you move your mouse to that button and just hover it comes up with six different options for how to lay out your screen. Yes, now if you just click on the box, it automatically maximizes it. That’s not one of the six, okay, but it’s got six different ways of setting up your screen. And then when you do that, it comes up and you can click on what you want in each of the different areas and break it. Will break it into four different quadrants and stuff like that. So it’s really cool. Now that said this part of this was under Windows 10 as well. You could click on the bar at the top and slide your mouse to the right or left or top. And what it does is it takes and if you go to the top, it’ll maximize your screen. If you go to the right, it takes it and makes it fit on the right or left. It fits on the left. That’s the same as it’s been in Windows 10. It’s when your mouse hits that side. But the thing about Windows 11 is you can do that if you do it at the top part of one of the right or left, it will actually see if you want it to be that upper quadrant.

Brent Warner 4:28
Okay, so there’s more kind of sectioning for the choices, right?

Tim Van Norman 4:33
Which is what the other does at the same time. And so there’s two different ways of getting to that. Is where I’m going with this. Okay, so really cool issue, and it drag, drop, and you’re done. It’s so nice.

Brent Warner 4:44
I this as a Mac person. This is probably the first thing I’ve seen in Windows that makes me go, ooh, that would be nice on Mac (laughter) we do have little external apps that you can do that do similar ish things, but it’s very, very smooth on Windows 11. So nice. Okay, so I think is that two for you? Tim, right there. Did you just double up? Okay,

Tim Van Norman 5:06
Well, and I’ll add another one to my list.

Brent Warner 5:08
Okay, okay, so we’ll, we’ll give you a freebie, right? All right, so next for me is Canvas. I don’t know if a lot of people do this, maybe they do, but put a handful of comments into your speed grader comment bank. So Speed Grader does have a comment bank. I get, I think that there some teachers probably get over ambitious with it and try to put in a bunch of things, and then you’re never going to be able to access anything put in just a few that you regularly use. So if one that I put in immediately was no submission, right? Just no submission period, and it’s like, Okay, quick click. I wish it was a little actually faster to access, because it does pop out a window. But regardless, quick click into getting a couple of basic comments that I reuse every time. It’s really worth having a few of their, of a few of those that are not too many, because too many, you’ll get lost, but a handful of quick comments in the speed grader comment bank

Tim Van Norman 6:03
Along those lines, with that, if you start your comment consistently different, then when you start typing your comments, it will actually do a search, and you can just click and fill it in. Oh, yes, yeah, I learned that the hard way, as I did, exactly what you suggest, what you suggested not to do. I had a bunch of I had a whole bunch in there, and I did it early in the semester, and they stayed there through the speed grader for to the end of the semester, and but several of them started the same way, and that just made it more difficult. So think about how you would naturally phrase it and see if you can train yourself that way.

Brent Warner 6:43
Or put a number if you if you can’t start it with a number, if you said 1234, and then that number would be there. But who cares? Right? Like, it’s not a big deal. So okay, we gotta keep moving!

Tim Van Norman 6:56
All right. So um, along those lines, the email, remember, there it is. Remember, you get a game. If you go into Canvas and you pull up a page that doesn’t exist, and then you hit Enter, ah, yes, you have to pull the page up. But then you can get to this game. And there’s several different games. So, oh, are there? I thought there was only one, okay, no, there’s. They’ve, over the years, they’ve added a couple of different games. So this has been something we’ve mentioned in the something we’ve mentioned in the past, but go for it.

Brent Warner 7:24
Yeah, a little a little fun, a little break time. Good, very nice. Okay, so mine in Canva not Canvas some teachers or some some people may be aware that there’s an option to bulk create. So this is kind of the equivalent of mail merge inside of Canva. So if you wanted to do something like make, like slightly customized letters for all of your students at the end of the semester, that’s like, with a design. Or if you wanted to give everybody, like a digital graphic that has their name that they could then print out, or whatever it is, right? Maybe a background, a zoom background, something like that. You could customize whatever you want and put click a single button, upload from a CV or CSV file, and then, and then, it’ll make as many different graphics that kind of match with your customized wording as you want. So Canva, bulk creator is a great feature.

Tim Van Norman 8:17
Wow, haven’t heard of that. That’s one that’s excellent, yeah. So going back to Windows for a moment, you know, in Windows, it’s got that search bar at the bottom that takes up a quarter of your it feels like it takes up so much of your task. Bar at the bottom, if you right, click on it, you can turn it off, you can hide it completely, or you can turn it into an ion. Either one is great, but it doesn’t matter if you even have it, because if you click on the start button itself and start typing, don’t click on anything else, just click on the start button and start typing, it will do the same thing as the search bar does.

Brent Warner 8:54
Oh, yeah, nice. So you just, you can just instantly start typing and searching right away, without without going into a visible search bar. Right, right? I like it. Good, excellent. Okay, so mine. So Tim, you and I have talked about this. I love the Chrome extension e comments, but it looks like it might be going away or something’s happening to it, and so I’m not sure, but I am preparing myself. And I think Tim, we’ve already talked about this, there’s a this. There’s a one called annotate pro by a company called 11 trees, and if you want to replace e comments. So if you this is the one where, if you highlight a section on your Google Docs, and I think it works in Microsoft Word too, or whatever, but you can highlight a section, and then the little window pops up and all of the pre populated things, so similar to the canvas Speed Grader, pre populated comment bank, you can have your own comments for documents that your students are writing. I have a lot of these for my students, you know, like grammar checks and, you know, all sorts of little things like that, just common issues that come up in writing. So annotate pro might be a nice. Choice for some of us.

Tim Van Norman 10:02
Absolutely. It’s a really cool system. I’ve liked using that. So why don’t you give one more and then I’ll give my last one.

Brent Warner 10:11
Okay, so my next one is grouper dot school. Grouper dot school. I saw this online, and basically what it does this is dot school is the.com it’s the subdomain, right? So, so if you go to group or dot school, I think it’s free right now, it’s all in beta. I’m not 100% sure if they’re going to charge later, but basically, you put in your students names, and then you can isolate them by different sets of criteria. So you could say, Hey, if you wanted to put in things like gender, if you wanted to put in things like language ability, if you wanted to put in things like, you know, areas of strength, right? Leader list person has leadership skills or something like that, right? And so you can create all your own categories, and then click a button, and it will create well balanced groups based amongst your student, whatever student things you’re looking for. So if you said something like in my class, if I were to say, hey, this student has a really good writing skills overall, this student’s struggling quite a bit, and I might rank that in some different way. And then it might put those students together so that they can work together and build from each other and whatever, whatever delineation you’re looking for. So, pretty nice.

Tim Van Norman 11:22
No, I that That’s amazing. Yeah, yeah, I’ve never heard of that.

Brent Warner 11:27
I think it’s new. I think it is new. So, yeah,

Tim Van Norman 11:32
I could use that for my class.

Brent Warner 11:34
Yeah, next semester,

Tim Van Norman 11:35
Exactly, exactly. All right, so my last one, it has to do with Outlook, okay? And well, email inboxes in general, but I specifically do this in Outlook. So in my Outlook, I have five different inboxes that I checking at work. I’ve got four different inboxes I check at home and stuff like that. So I use the favorites to keep all of my inboxes together, so I don’t have to go search through and see, did I get an email in one of these? But even more important, yes, I go with almost a zero in inbox. But ignore that for a moment. If you have read all of your emails, then in your inbox, next to the email, next to the where it says inbox and tells you what the account is, it will give a number. If there’s any unread messages, that number. So if you’ve read all your messages, all you have to do is glance and immediately, you know, Oh, yep, got a new email in that one. You don’t have to go find it. You don’t have to look around. Now, that’s for somebody who lives in their email like I do, if you check it twice a day, like I hear you do, that’s probably not a big deal, but for somebody like me, who literally is in the email all day, yeah, it’s a wonderful thing to do.

Brent Warner 12:48
So basically, instead of like other people might have like, 1012, and those numbers just kind of float there. And you never really know exactly when new ones are coming in. But if you have zero blink and then all of a sudden there’s a one or two, then you know that there are new ones in there.

Tim Van Norman 13:01
That’s great. Exactly. If it was 10 or 12, I don’t think anybody would have a problem. I was looking at somebody today, and they had 4000 (laughter) so…

Brent Warner 13:10
No comment on that. Okay, so my last one then is Google Slides has new templates. And I’m not sure if everybody has seen these or explored them, but they’re really quite nice because it’s taken forever they have not updated. Not updated in a long, long, long, long time. And of course, there’s all the new AI slide builders and all these things. And they’re fun, but it’s really nice just to kind of have something that you trust right in Google Slides, a lot of good designs in there, including stuff for teachers and things like that. So if you haven’t looked what, next time you’re in Google Slides, go, click on Insert and then templates, and you can see a lot of the new selections that are available for you and worth checking out. Nice. Whoo, okay, Tim, we’re gonna have to get this outro in here in one minute. Let’s see if we can do it.

Tim Van Norman 13:57
Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at the higher edtech podcast.com

Brent Warner 14:03
As always, we do want your feedback, so please go to the higher edtech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts.

Tim Van Norman 14:09
We hope everyone has a great winter break and a safe and happy new year. I’m Tim Van Norman

Brent Warner 14:15
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care. Everybody, have a good break.