This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

We started off the week by going a little meta and providing A 30-second Introduction to ProfHacker, and Call for Guest Posts. We received a ton of great proposals, and I look forward to working with future guest authors (after Jason and George do their editorial thing).

We certainly hope you found something useful from our posts this week, which included:

• Natalie pulled together links From the Archives: On Classroom Discussion—a useful collection as we begin the new semester.
• We also discussed several software utilities: Billie with Using PDFMyURL, George with PearNote: Take Notes That Sync Text, Audio, Video, and Slides, Mark with A New Alternative for Taking and Sharing Notes: 3Banana Notes, and Amy with A Review of NOOKStudy.
• In hardware-related...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

We certainly hope you found something useful from our posts this week, which included the following in a wide range of topics:

• Guest author Louisa Burnham started off the week with a narrative of her experiences during six weeks of travel this summer with no other computer than her iPad.
• It was a good week for guest posts, as Bethany Nowviskie provided a ton of great advice in "The #alt-ac Track: Negotiating Your 'Alternative Academic' Appointment".
• As most of us head back to the classroom, Billie's latest entry in the "Disruptive Students" series proved quite popular; there was good discussion in Disruptive Student Behavior: The Disrespecters.
• Continuing the pedagogical trend, Natalie discussed Assigning Students to Small Groups. Additionally, this week...

A few days ago, Google released Priority Inbox for Gmail, which is an opt-in experimental (read: "beta") setting that is rolling out incrementally to Gmail users—I was lucky enough to get it on Monday but your mileage may vary. If you see a link at the top right of your Gmail interface (where the settings and help links are located) alerting you to the Priority Inbox (it will say "New! Priority Inbox"), you can click that link to activate the Priority Inbox feature and begin to configure an additional method for filtering your e-mail.

In addition to the basic spam filtering, and any actual Gmail filters you have created on your own, and any labels you have created and apply manually or automatically, the Priority Inbox functionality can help you to sort through what remains. Before going further with my own discussion of it, I recommend taking the next two minutes to watch this...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

We certainly hope you found something useful from our posts this week, which included the following (heavy on classroom-oriented content...it must be the start of a new semester!)

• Jason started off the week with a review of Barbara Strauch's The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain, in Your Mind at Middle Age: A Review of The Grown-Up Brain.
• Billie's How to Avoid Being a Jerk in the Classroom was by far the most popular of the week, and many commenters shared additional tips they have found helpful in maintaining a jerk-free classroom.
• Speaking of the beginning of the academic year, Kathleen proposed New (Academic) Year's Resolutions and Natalie collected a number of useful posts on time management in From the Archives: Time Management for the New Semester.
• In...

Two weeks ago I asked readers to talk about the tech tools they were most excited to take into the classroom this semester.

The impetus behind this question was a request for participants in a poll by ReadWriteWeb author Audrey Watters; her follow-up post on August 15th, "Teachers Pick Their Top 5 Back-To-School Tech Tools", discussed her poll results. Specifically, her poll found educators most excited to integrate the following tools in their classrooms:

1. iPad/mobile learning devices (including netbooks)
2. Twitter
3. Google Apps for Education
4. student blogs
5. Sharing and Collaboration Tools (including wikis)

I thought the responses Audrey gathered would differ from those gathered in the comments to my original post, given the difference in audience between ReadWriteWeb and ProfHacker—I expected answers from ProfHacker readers would show more curiosity about technology than...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

We certainly hope you found something useful from our posts this week—and considering this was the best week ever as far as traffic to ProfHacker goes, we think you probably did. Hooray!

• The most popular post of the week was a clear winner: Brian's An Open Letter to New Graduate Students. As some of you pointed out in the comments (and we quickly adjusted in the text), the content of this post was most applicable to full-time students enrolled in a PhD program, and we were missing out on addressing students in MA programs and/or attending graduate school part-time. We are busily collecting tips specifically geared for this audience as well; if you have some you would like to contribute, please send those comments to ProfHackerCHE@gmail.com or @-reply to...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

We certainly hope you found something useful from our posts this week; judging from the number of comments and great discussion in many threads, we believe you did (and that makes us happy):

• The most popular post of the week was Ryan's How to Start Tweeting (and Why You Might Want To), and deservedly so. The Twitter buzz around it was pretty good...which you'd know if you were on Twitter...which perhaps this post prompted some of you to do.
• We began the week with what we lovingly called "Omeka Day": I wrote A Brief Introduction to Omeka and Jeff followed that up with Teaching with Omeka. The third post of the day was Natalie's very popular From the Archives: Preparing for the First Week of Classes, which doesn't have anything to do with Omeka but it could in...

I'm not sure I've ever said this out loud, but ReadWriteWeb is my absolute favorite blog in all the blogosphere, and has been since they began covering all things technology-related in 2003 or so—it's the emphasis on critical thinking and analysis rather than knee-jerk "first!" responses to news and events that makes me respect them so.

Recently, my most favorite RWW author (Audrey Watters) asked educators for input via Twitter: what's the tech tool you're most excited to take into the classroom with you this fall?. Audrey is collecting responses for use in an upcoming RWW story, so between now and August 15th feel free to help her out.

However, I'm interested in your answers as well. No, I don't aim to write a similar story as Audrey, but I do wonder about the different answers based on the different audiences. Audrey's readership comes from the already...

I've long held that Omeka is (or soon will be) one of the killer apps of academia. Now, given that I felt similarly as strong about Webvan and Pets.com, perhaps the good folks at CHNM would prefer I kept my opinions to myself on this matter. But the combination of attention to audience, growth of developer community, and commitment to the open-source ethos make the entire Omeka project something to watch—and, if applicable to your work, something to use.

In the first of a two-part Omeka fest here at ProfHacker, I'm just going to give a brief overview and some pointers to additional materials ahead of Jeffrey McClurken's lengthy and rich post later today on teaching with Omeka.

What is It?

The oft-bandied-about description of Omeka is "WordPress for museums" despite the fact that Omeka isn't WordPress and many more institutions (and individuals) than museums can use it. But the...

This post wraps up another week of tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

In the coming weeks we will be modifying the schedule slightly to better meet the needs of our readers. We will ask specific questions in the "Open Thread Wednesday" posts, and we will be moving the food-related posts to a twice-monthly general wellness post opposite the "From the Archives" slots on Mondays at 3pm.

But this time around, we certainly hope you found something useful from our posts:

• Guest author—soon to be regular author—Mark Sample started off the week with The Long Way Home: Hacking Your Commute When Cars Just Aren't Enough. We are happy to welcome Mark to the fold, and will be getting all those administrative details squared away soon.
• We had a few posts in some way related to Google this week: Heather's All Things Google: Custom...