Category: Productivity


September 1, 2010, 03:00 PM ET

5 Android Apps I Can't Live Without (and Why)

5 Android AppsBack in June Ethan began an informal series on ProfHacker with his 5 Applications I Simply Can't Live Without (and Why). He followed that 5 WordPress Plugins I Simply Can't Live Without (and Why), and the popular 5 iPad Applications I Simply Can't...well, you get the idea.

The idea of 5 [Insert Cool Software Here] I Can't Live Without (and Why) has endless, useful variations, such as Brian's list of 5 essential iPod Touch apps, and now, my own contribution to the series, in which I'll shift the focus onto the Android operating system. With a mere 50,000 or so applications, the Android Market pales in comparison to Apple's App Store, but it can nonetheless be difficult to find the perfect app to fit your needs. So I'll run through 5 essential Android apps that work for me. As with the other 5 [Insert Cool Software Here] posts, I am not recommending any specific applications so much as I ...

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August 30, 2010, 08:00 AM ET

iPad: Traveling Cold Turkey

Andorra[This is a guest post by Louisa A. Burnham, Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College.]

I am an academic medievalist, and I have spent six weeks traveling this summer with no other computer than my iPad. Here are some thoughts about my experience. First off, the technical details: I have the 64g WiFi iPad, and I traveled in Israel, Jordan, Cyprus, Spain and Andorra. I was mostly on the road for two weeks (Israel, Jordan and Cyprus), and mostly in one place (Barcelona) for a month.

Connectivity

I had to rely on WiFi, and mostly did just fine on the road, with the usual "this hotel's WiFi sucks" kinds of problems.

For Barcelona, however, I brought along a travel router, since I knew that I could get an ethernet connection in my room but not WiFi. This was brilliant. I had my own little WiFi zone just for me! Email, internet, no problem. I didn't Skype at all, so I can't tell...

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August 26, 2010, 03:00 PM ET

Social Bookmarking Even When You're Not Social: Why I Use Delicious

bookmarks[This is a guest post by Derek Bruff, assistant director at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and senior lecturer in mathematics at Vanderbilt.  You can follow Derek on Twitter (@derekbruff) and on his blog, where he writes about educational technology, student motivation, and visual thinking, among other topics. At ProfHacker, he has written about Multiple Choice Questions on Exams, Pre-Class Quizzes on Wordpress, and Motivating Students with Application Projects and Poster Sessions.]

On Jennifer Imazeki's great Economics for Teachers blog, Jennifer recently asked for suggestions why one might make the jump from "regular" bookmarking (saving interesting websites using the bookmarks or favorites tool in your browser) to social bookmarking (using an online service like Delicious or Diigo to save those interesting websites). Jennifer's post got me thinking about why I'm a fan ...

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August 25, 2010, 11:00 AM ET

Open Thread: Favorite Browser Extensions?

Megaphone [Each week at ProfHacker, George Williams hosts "Open Thread Wednesday." We recently decided to devote each open thread to a specific issue or question. The Commenting and Community Guidelines still apply.

You can suggest topics or ask us questions via email: ProfHackerCHE@gmail.com. —Ed.]

Internet Explorer's got 'em. Firefox's got 'em. Chrome's got 'em. Safari's got 'em. Just about every major browser's got'em: extensions.

What's a browser extension? I'm guessing you already know this: it's a free add-on tool designed to supplement or customize the built-in functions of your Web browser. You can use extensions to do such things as simplify your Internet searches, make it easier to save Web pages to your Delicious account, improve your experience of YouTube videos, or block advertisements that intrude on your ability to read the news. Customizing your Web browser with your own...

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August 24, 2010, 03:00 PM ET

ProfHacking Your Personal Finance Software

piggy bankAcademia is characterized by a myriad of financial arrangements. You might receive your paycheck every two weeks while your household bills are due every month, and two two-week periods do not usually line up with a month. Maybe you earn some consultant income every now and then. Perhaps you're a graduate student switching from an RA to a TA, each of which has a different pay schedule. Then there are of course bills to pay. Thankfully, there are a number of tools available to keep track of money coming in and going out of your personal accounts. This post will focus on digital tools, as opposed to pencil-and-paper methods.

I first started using personal finance software ten years ago as an undergraduate student who had a number of campus and summer jobs pooled together to help pay for my education. Back then the market was dominated by Microsoft Money, which I used and has since been...

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August 23, 2010, 03:00 PM ET

From the Archives: Time Management for the New Semester

clock towerMaybe your semester starts this week, or next. Maybe you've already been teaching for a few days and are already grading the first set of assignments. Whatever your academic calendar, chances are good that pretty soon your schedule will be full. Here are some posts from the ProfHacker archives that might help as you navigate the transition into the semester's routine.

Figure Out Your Priorities

Jason makes a very good point about The Difference Between Workload and Expectations Management: "it’s a lot easier to change expectations than it is workload." Figuring out which aspects of your workload are external and which are due to your own perceptions is an essential first step to gaining more control and peace of mind. In Advice on Faculty Workload, Jeff discusses Tenured Radical's (aka Claire Potter) suggestions for faculty about avoiding overload and how to say no to some demands ...

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August 23, 2010, 08:00 AM ET

Your Mind at Middle Age: A Review of The Grown-Up Brain

BrainMore or less every night for the last seven years, I've sung "The Star-Spangled Banner" to our kid as he drifts off to sleep. He looks forward to it, and sings along about half the time. It's a sweet, patriotic moment—except for all the times I blank on the words.

It's not that I hate America, or somehow don't really know the lyrics: I've sung the anthem more than 2500 times over the past seven years—it's engraved in my mind. Every six months or so, though, I lose all recollection of three or fourlines for several nights in a row. (Like these poor souls [YouTube], except with less talent.) After about three nights, the lyrics come back, and everything's back to normal.

While I haven't started forgetting names yet—yet—this lyrical blackout has always felt like an harbinger of middle age, or of absentminded professordom, and so it was with great interest that I picked up Barbara...

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August 20, 2010, 08:00 AM ET

The Rule of 200

buoysAs the semester quickly approaches, I find myself trying to shift gears from summer-writing mode to semester-juggling mode. In the summer, I have the luxury of devoting the majority of my time and energy to my research agenda. There are no courses to prepare, no papers to grade, no committee meetings to attend, and no students to advise. The writing can take as long as it takes, which is often the better part of a day. During the semester, however, many of us aren't so lucky. We have to find a way to balance research with teaching and service, and that can be very difficult to do.

Often, because the research goals are long-term rather than immediate, they get the short end of the stick. Elsewhere on ProfHacker, Kathleen Fitzpatrick has talked about The First Half Hour of the Morning, and Billie Hara has written about 750words.com, both of which can help writers make progress and...

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August 19, 2010, 08:00 AM ET

Managing Twitter Favorites

gold star[This is a guest post by Matt Thomas, a PhD Candidate in American Studies at the University of Iowa. You can follow him on Twitter: @mattthomas.]

If you spend time browsing the Web, you undoubtedly come across stuff you don't want to or simply can't deal with right away. It could be an article you want to read, a website you want to explore, an audio clip you want to listen to, a video you want to watch, or a piece of software you want to try out. Tools like Instapaper and Read It Later make it easy to save these things for later. But what do you do when you come across a tweet you don't want to or simply can't deal with right away but that you'd like to save for later, either because it's inherently interesting to you or because it contains a link to something you want to check out when you have more time?.

Twitter offers a built-in solution to this problem: Twitter favorites....

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August 17, 2010, 11:00 AM ET

Check Your Backups

sync or swimThere you are, minding your own business, when your hard drive starts to make that suspicious grinding sound. Or you discover that your laptop is not where you left it. Or your web hosting provider suffers a catastrophic data loss.

No sweat, you say. I'm a ProfHacker reader, and so I'm all about the backups. (If you're not yet all about the backups, you might take a moment to check out some of our posts on backing up your stuff, including Annual Reminders--Backup, Back Up Your Essential Files Using Dropbox, How to Back Up Your Cloud, Backing Up a Campus Email Account, A Few Ways to Back Up Your Website, and Backing Up Your Social Network, among others.)

Suffice it to say that this is not the moment at which you want to discover that your carefully laid backup plan isn't working.

A while back, I wrote about the importance of backing up your WordPress blog, an issue I'd mostly been...

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