Meetings, Syllabi, and Twitter, oh my! Prof. Hacker’s week in review

If your semester hasn’t already started, it’s probably about to! This week at Prof. Hacker we looked at several things you can do to get ready for the new year:

• George wrote about getting your car and pantry ready
• Natalie and I looked at the syllabus–giving it a redesign and setting expectations
• George, Natalie, and I wrote about ways to defend your health and sanity: using your calendar (one, two), scheduling catch-up days, and going paperless for health reasons.
• Julie explained Google Docs and Twitter clients and reviewed CloudBerry, a backup service with a free academic license; Ethan looked at Prezi, a new web-based presentation tool, Jeff explored using students as tech mentors, and Alex proposed an iPhone-style app for close reading.
• Other posts included Brian’s look at tenure, a provocation about meetings, and a query about resolutions for the new academic year.

Prof. Hacker welcomed three (!) new writers this week: Natalie Houston, Alex Jarvis, and Jeffrey W. McClurken.  We are always looking for new contributors, though–in particular, we’d like some representation from the sciences.  If you’re interested, please e-mail!

If you’re not following @profhacker on Twitter, you missed these links:

• Using Microsoft Office to Generate Gradesheets
• Using a Google Docs spreadsheet to manage GTD
• Using Gmail labels to manage GTD
• Guidelines for requesting letters of recommendation

. . . and much more besides!  Thanks so much to all our readers, especially our thoughtful commenters! Don’t forget to take a picture of your desk for our Share Your Space series! Stay Positive!  Ok. I’m all out of exclamation points.

[image by flickr user tvol / cc licensed]