Academic Tech Tips

A new inactivity alert feature has been added as an option to all lesson pages within Sakai. When activated, the alert will automatically trigger and email for any user that has not selected a specific lesson page. Instructors have the ability to set one time, daily, or weekly reminders for users that have not selected a specific lesson.

Each lesson page can have its own alert implanted. This new feature ensures that all students are accessing classroom content.  Instructors have the ability to discover if students are really taking part and using classroom material or simply doing without.

Alerts take just minutes to create and can be done before or during a semester. Check out the support documentation for a set-by-step guide on achieving an inactivity alert.

If you are working on a project or planning a trip, Google’s Bookmark Lists offer an easy way to organize and share the links you find. To use Google Bookmarks, you must have a Google account or create one. Once you log into Google, start searching through Google and click on the star next to any links, maps or videos that you find interesting.

To access your starred links, go to your Google Bookmarks homepage. To organize your bookmarks into a list, just click on the Create New List button.

From here, you can select bookmarks to add to lists and share them with friends. The lists are defaulted to the private setting but if you want to share, here are your options:

Private – Nobody can see it
Public – Anybody can find it and view it
Share with select people – Those people can now add links and comments to your list

Writing out notes and keeping track of all of those bits of paper can be a hard task to manage. Evernote has developed a free digital management system for all of your notes. Evernote incorporates the use of your computer, your mobile devices and the Internet to make your information accessible all of the time. If you are at a meeting or a class and you want to quickly remember the information, you can take a picture of the whiteboard and add it to your notes.  Evernote also has a useful feature that can read text in photographs or handwritten notes to make them easily searchable.  Some other ways to add information are through to-do lists, notes, web selections and voice memos.  Once you have many notes, it is easy to organize them into categories and add tags.

Overall, Evernote is a helpful tool that acts like your own digital file cabinet. If you want to learn more or try it out, visit the Evernote homepage.

If you use Gmail, there is a handy new feature that will enable you to add Google Gadgets to your Gmail page.  Google Gadgets are interactive mini-applications that you can display on your Web page, such as weather, personalized news and more.  When you add a Gadget, it will always appear on the sidebar of your email. Even though the sidebar is small, it is a convenient way to have resources readily available.

How to Insert Gadgets:

• 1. In your Gmail account, click on Settings.
• 2. Under the Labs tab, you can find different features to add to your Gmail. To add custom gadgets, go to Add any Gadget by URL and click Enable.

• 3. Then go to the Gadgets tab (within Settings) and you can enter any Gadgets’ URL, which is an XML page.  To get the URL, click on the gadget you want from the Gadgets page.  Click on the View Source link on the bottom of the page, then copy the URL from the URL window. 

Here a few URLs for popular Gadgets (copy and paste in the Gadget URL box to activate):

• Twitter: http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml
• Google Maps: http://www.google.com/ig/modules/mapsearch.xml
• Facebook: http://www.brianngo.net/ig/facebook.xml
• Digg News: http://digg.com/goog/ig.xml
• World Clock: http://gad.getpla.net/poly/clock.xml
• Ask a Word (Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia): http://www.openinventions.com/spellcheck/openinventions_spellcheck.xml

Remember the Milk

As the fall semester comes to end and the holidays are fast-approaching, keeping track of holiday shopping and long to-do lists seems inevitable. If you still are relying on sticky notes and writing your reminders on bits of paper, you may want to try out the helpful Web task management tool, Rememberthemilk.com. Remember the Milk is a free Web-based application that can help you simplify and organize all of your tasks in one place.  This software allows you to create categorized task lists and send out reminders via text message, email, Twitter or even instant messages.

A few highlights of the Remember the Milk include:

• – Add a Google Calendar or Gmail sidebar gadget. This allows you review your tasks alongside your calendar and email.

• – Locate your task. Easily assign locations to a task to help plan the best way to get things done.
• – Add tasks from a mobile device. Just send an email with one task per line to your Remember the Milk import email address and it will add the items to your task list.
• – Print out your weekly check lists.