My students can tell you that I like for there to be a good answer to the “so what” question; in other words, if I’m going to teach about a concept, my students should know what I’m asking them to learn, why they should learn it, and what they should be able to take away…
Read More The “so what” behind the Accessible Document Specialist credentialSo I’ve gone pretty much all in on DevonThink 3. David Sparks said on one of his podcasts something to the effect of, “I had DevonThink 2, but I wasn’t sure how to use it. Now I’m all in on version 3.” [1]Not a direct quote, and he’s talked about DevonThink on several different podcasts.…
Read More When a website creates an ugly PDF…how to fix in DevonThinkI do have two computers at home (as mentioned elsewhere on this site): a MacBook Pro, and a 2015-era custom built computer. I didn’t realize the custom built was that old — but I guess I must have done a good job when I ordered it! (To be fair, the computer *has* had its Windows…
Read More Running Windows 11 on a “lesser powered” machine…it works on lesser powered Macs!Without a doubt, the BBC news theme is the best news theme out there. One of their weathermen, Owain Wyn Evans, did this version as part of his drumathon for Children in Need. The way the theme is constructed is worthy of analysis… and might just be a part of one of my classes! 🎼🥁[1]…
Read More The best news theme…taken to 11So I have the chance to teach a course at GC that I previously taught at Bethel, and was dreading the thought of moving the course from Moodle to D2L. There’s a blog at South Suburban College that explains the process quite well. I thought I’d talk about what happens once you follow their directions.…
Read More Moving from Moodle to D2L (Part 1)Magnus Carlsen is the current world chess champion. He’s also become quite the entrepreneur, with a variety of companies falling under the “Play Magnus” banner, including Chessable (which I really should use more), a couple of apps, and Aimchess. Aimchess claims to utilize analytics from a player’s own games to create personalized training programs. Since…
Read More My initial adventures with Aimchess…And what do a couple of Research 1 schools have to teach those of us at liberal arts schools? I’ve been trying to update our department’s annual Individual Faculty Report (IFR) to make it easier to understand. It’s forced me to think more about what makes for an effective teacher. Yes, there are lots of…
Read More How do we evaluate college teaching…I can’t say that I’m much of a gamer. But my son loves Madden and FIFA. Thus, we’ve given EA a fair share of money over the years. But it’s nice to see that they’re giving back to the accessibility community in much the same way that Microsoft and Logitech have. Yeah for free access…
Read More Electronic Arts does something good!One of the things I do like about the Mac ecosystem is that there can be some nice synergies between programs and their respective Mac/iPad/iPhone versions. OmniOutliner is one of those programs. I remember in my days of competing in forensics, I’d take the 30 minutes of preparation time in extemporaneous speaking, write my outline…
Read More OmniOutliner and Teaching (Part 1)This was one of those ideas I had seen somewhere – I want to say Scrivener for Dummies (I’m not ashamed to say I have that book).
Read More Scrivener Tip: Making the General window more helpful