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Author Archives: Ryan Cordell

May 28, 2012, 11:00 am

Disposable Twitter Accounts for Classroom Use

By Ryan Cordell

Twitter comes up frequently on ProfHacker. We write about Twitter in the classroom, Twitter for conference (and unconference) backchannels, and using Twitter as part of a web presence strategy. One of my first ProfHacker posts was all about how and why academics should consider using the service. When it comes to the classroom, however, there are complications with requiring Twitter. These include:

  • Some professors are uncomfortable requiring students to use a commerical service for their classes. Requiring Twitter is different from, say, requiring a textbook printed by a commercial publisher, because Twitter requires personal information of students.
  • Some professors are uncomfortable with the public nature of Twitter. They don’t want to require students to create content that significant others, family members, or potential employers might discover—not necessarily because they expect…

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May 21, 2012, 8:00 am

Lessons Learned from Student Evaluations?

By Ryan Cordell

The semester is over. Grades are submitted. Summer approaches. And student evaluations are complete and ready to review. Student evaluations, as most professors know, are an imperfect arbiter of teaching excellence. Nonetheless, student evaluations can point to aspects of classes that need development and improvement, especially when many students point to the same issues in their evaluations.

This semester, for instance, I taught a course for the first time. It was a course I was excited to teach—an upper-division course, squarely in my areas of interest—and for the most part it went well. As with any new course, however, the semester was an experiment, and parts of that experiment worked better than others. In my student evaluations, I noticed several trends that I will consider closely as I revise the course to teach it again in the fall:

  • The relationships between the course…

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May 14, 2012, 11:00 am

Simplify, Simplify!

By Ryan Cordell

I have confessed before my appreciation for Henry David Thoreau—an odd thinker, perhaps, for a ProfHacker to esteem. Nevertheless, I think Thoreau can be a useful antidote to unbridled techno-lust. As I wrote in that earlier post, “I want to use gadgets and software that will help me do things I already wanted to do—but better, or more efficiently, or with more impact.” I don’t want to acumulate things for their own sake.

In one of my favorite passages from Walden, Thoreau recalls, “I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.” When I teach Walden, I often ask my students to reflect on this extreme reaction: “Why does Thoreau have such an adverse reaction to such a seemingly simple task? Is he lazy? Is he crazy?” They sometimes…

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April 23, 2012, 11:00 am

It’s That Time of Year: Hold On!

By Ryan Cordell

It’s that time of year, and my post today is short. Here’s a video from Alabama Shakes that’s helping me get through the final weeks of the semester. Whether you’re buried under papers, marking final exams, or rushing to finish an article, just hold on!

Alabama Shakes’ debut album, Boys and Girls, is available right now.

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April 9, 2012, 11:00 am

Teach That Class (Again) Using Blog Copier

By Ryan Cordell

blog-copierIn February I wrote about using WordPress 3.0′s multisite feature to create class websites. I wrote about how easy it is to create separate websites for each course one teaches while managing them through a unified administrative interface. Last week I discovered a plugin that enhances WordPress’ multisite features for course websites. Blog Copier allows users to create duplicate sites within a multisite network with a single button click. The plugin creates the new site and imports into it all of the pages, posts, plugins, themes, and widgets from the old site.

So, if you’re planning a course that you’ve taught before, you can simply duplicate the course website and then tweak the details that have changed, saving you significant setup time. In my case, I have to make some adjustments for a semester-long course that I’m teaching in an abbreviated summer term, but I won’t have to…

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April 3, 2012, 8:00 am

Create an Easy, Online Gradebook with Learnboost

By Ryan Cordell

learnboost_gradebookI’ve written several times this semester about using WordPress to manage my classes (see my previous posts about the Scholarpress Courseware plugin and using WordPress multisite for classes). One feature I’ve not yet found in a WordPress plugin, however, is an easy-to-use gradebook; that’s the one feature I miss from my college’s LMS.

Fortunately, a few weeks ago I saw Jana Remy’s tweet about Learnboost, a free, online gradebook program that looked very promising. It turns out that Audrey Waters has written quite a bit about LearnBoost over at Hack Education, and you can get more information about the company and the software there. Learnboost also provides several introductory videos on their site.

I’ve been experimenting with Learnboost for a few weeks, and I’ve found it flexible and, what’s perhaps most important, dead simple to set up and use. I don’t use some of its…

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February 27, 2012, 11:00 am

Using a WordPress Multisite Network for Class Web Pages

By Ryan Cordell

In a recent post I discussed my use of the ScholarPress Courseware WordPress plugin to manage my course websites. I listed my current course sites in that post,

which led several folks on Twitter to ask me how I create those course websites: are they each separate WordPress installations? Each course website sits on a subdirectory of my main website, but each has a different theme, different users, and some different plugins.

For my courses, I use the multisite network feature built into WordPress 3. This means that all of my WordPress sites are unified under one administrative interface: I use one login and can navigate between my personal site, my course sites, and a project blog. WordPress provides a detailed explanation of how to enable its multisite features, so I won’t belabor this post repeating their step-by-step…

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February 22, 2012, 8:00 am

Backup Google Documents with Insync

By Ryan Cordell

Insync logoProfHacker loves Google Docs and backup plans. Today’s recommendation combines the two. Recently a post at Lifehacker made me aware of Insyc, free software that creates a folder on your hard drive and automatically syncs the documents in your Google Docs to it. Insync works in both directions—new documents added online are downloaded to your hard drive, and documents added to the synced folder are uploaded to Google Docs. I’ve only played with Insync for a few days, but it seems to work as advertised. I certainly feel better about adding content to Google Docs knowing I will have a local copy of what I create there. I can also use Insync to backup local documents to Google Docs. I look forward to testing Insync more thoroughly in the coming weeks.

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February 13, 2012, 11:00 am

Manage Classes in WordPress with ScholarPress Courseware

By Ryan Cordell

We write about WordPress all the time at ProfHacker. A few years ago, David Parry wrote specifically about using WordPress as a learning management system for his classes. This semester, I decided to take that leap, and have been managing my courses through my own WordPress installation:

(more…)

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January 30, 2012, 11:00 am

a-JAYS One+ Earphones Won’t Tangle When Traveling

By Ryan Cordell

Lately I’ve been traveling quite a bit, which means juggling essential electronics in airports, through security, onto planes, and so on. I always have my phone with me: for staying connected with family, checking trip details, and for keeping my work organized on the go. The headset that comes with Apple’s iPhone, however, leaves much to be desired. I particularly hate the way they get tangled in my pocket. I pull them out as I’m walking through the airport, for instance, and then spend several minutes working them out of knots—hopefully not running into anything or anyone in the process.

Last winter Mark wrote about the “Devil Horns” wrapping technique that can keep your cords free of tangles. Recently, however, I forgot my earphones on a trip and so in need of a new set. I found these: a-JAYS One+ earphones with built-in remote and mic. Despite the mixed reviews on Amazon (all…

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