Although you may have access to web space using your college or university account, whether or not that is a productive space depends on issues likely outside of your control. For instance, if you have relatively little disk space allotted to you, but you want to maintain multimedia downloads for your students, you are already limited by what you can store. Or, perhaps you do not have access to server-side scripting languages or any database software—so much for a dynamic web site or a blog installation such as WordPress. You might also find that institutional support is lacking—even if you have the world’s greatest IT department, they might be overwhelmed and unable to attend to your questions in a timely fashion. Or, you could have no support at all beyond an automated system that spits out your account information and password.

Whatever the case may be, wouldn’t it be nice...

In and of itself, Twitter does nothing. Twitter is simply a platform, or framework, that allows communication to occur. That communication is based partially on you alone, but also on the interactions between you and your “followers” as well as the people you follow and their followers. During the part of the day that I’m not a PhD student, I’m the technical director of an interactive media company; one of our services is consulting with businesses on their social networking strategies, including the use of Twitter. We use the following example when explaining Twitter to clients who are, let’s say, “skeptical” about the whole thing: Twitter is not about standing on a mountain shouting “I just had coffee!” into the valley and hoping someone hears. Instead, Twitter is about standing on that mountain and hollering to the person standing on the next mountain, and...

Previously on Prof. Hacker, Jason wrote “Backup for Back-to-School: 15% off Backblaze,” a post that offered some good points on backing up your data in the cloud as well as a service (and a current discount offer) to do so. As he noted, Backblaze is not the only backup service out there, and that’s true—there are quite a few out there and it can be difficult to choose which one is best for you. Subsequent to Jason’s post, someone from CloudBerry Lab contacted us and asked if we would review their product, CloudBerry Online Backup, currently in beta. I agreed, as the only person on the Prof. Hacker team at the time who uses a PC instead of a Mac.

That’s right: CloudBerry Online Backup is a Windows-only product. However, CloudBerry Lab makes it very clear that the reason their product is Windows-only is because their people are Windows experts; working with Windows is...

One of the goals of Prof. Hacker is to introduce to you some of the tools we use so that the tools become less intimidating. Face it, changing one’s preferred word processing program can be pretty intimidating—not only for you but for students as well. In this post, you’ll get a quick introduction to Google Docs as well as some “lessons learned” by yours truly. In the comments, I hope others will share their experiences using Google Docs in the classroom.

What is Google Docs?

Google Docs is a free Web-based word processing program. Although the name says “Docs,” you aren’t limited to just text-based documents with the occasional image thrown in for good measure. With Google “Docs” (and a Google Account) anyone can create or import spreadsheets and presentations in addition to documents. Once you have created or imported a document, spreadsheet or presentation, you can edit it,...

For me, “productivity” is all about reducing clicks and keystrokes—I spend the vast majority of my waking hours in front of a screen of some sort, click click clicking away to get the job done. To move on to the next task or—egads!—to go outside, I look for ways to reduce those clicks and keystrokes either through the number of applications I have open at one time, the number of times I launch or re-launch an application over the course of the day, or the number of keystrokes I use to make my applications do what I want.

Keyboard shortcuts are a big deal for me, so much so that if I wrote a post about them it would be book-length and therefore reduce my productivity at the moment. On this matter I will defer to Lifehacker’s Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained blog post, in which “keyboard shortcuts” is listed at #2, and where the keyboard-shortcuts tag lists well...

In a previous Prof. Hacker post, Jason Jones linked to Hillary Miller’s “Lessons from a First-Time Course Blogger”, which contains great advice such as making sure not to forget about the blog and not assuming students know everything about technology. This advice (and do read Miller’s entire post for an honest description of some lessons learned) meshes quite nicely with the roles of role model, tech support, and cheerleader we should play when implementing technology in the classroom.

But you should make several informed decisions before your class even begins, not the least of which is asking yourself if you already have enough familiarity with the concept and structure of a blog and a blog community before embarking on creating the same for your class. If you are reading this, chances are good that you are familiar with the paradigm of reverse chronological narrative...

In February 2009—approximately 3.5 years ago in “internet time”—Jeremy Boggs wrote a blog post that has stuck with me ever since. In “Three Roles for Teachers using Technology,” Boggs succinctly expresses three roles we should play if we want to achieve success when implementing technology in the classroom: role model, tech support, and cheerleader. After reading his post, I recalled the successes and failures of technology in the classroom—other instructors’ successes and failures as well as my own—and realized Boggs is exactly right: balancing those roles is the key to success.

• Being a role model for your students shows that you value the technology as well as the short-term and long-term benefits of its use. When students leave the classroom, will they have increased their technical literacy and be in a position “to be more critical about their use of...