Occasionally when the techs here are speaking with faculty, particularly in the free-form discussions that come up at our Wednesday morning “Blackboard with Cream & Sugar” sessions, the techs will mention tools we use that faculty are unaware of. Sometimes those tools can be adapted to use in the classroom, so I’m highlighting some such tools on the blog under the “Tech Toolbox” name. Today’s addition to the Tech Toolbox is an educational content creation and distribution tool: Educreations. From the website: “Teach what you know. Learn what you...

Occasionally when the techs here are speaking with faculty, particularly in the free-form discussions that come up at our Wednesday morning “Blackboard with Cream & Sugar” sessions, the techs will mention tools we use that faculty are unaware of. Sometimes those tools can be adapted to use in the classroom, so I plan to begin highlighting some such tools on the blog under the “Tech Toolbox” name. For the first installment of Tech Toolbox, I’d like to focus on a simple Windows-based tool that can aid when doing presentations in the classroom: ZoomIt, from...

Remember 35 millimeter slides? Yeah, me neither. No, really, although most of us don’t have occasion to use slide projectors any more, there are still boxes and carousels of slides floating around out there. Occasionally we in Academic Technology are asked “is there some way to have my slides scanned?” Yes, yes there is. Meet the ImageLab slide scanner. As you can see demonstrated in the video below, this little device makes it easy to digitize any 35 millimeter slides or negatives you have lying around. The scanner outputs JPG files, so there’s no fuss about using non-standard...

I’m just barely old enough to recall that sound through the speakers of an airplane: “*Ding* You are now free to move about the cabin.” It was never fun to know that I had to stay in one place, even if there wasn’t really any better place to be; sometimes I just wanted to know I could move around. (Of course, nowadays you’re discouraged from ever getting up unless you have to. Grumble grumble, get off my lawn.) I feel the same way when I’m projecting my computer screen through a data projector. I want to move around, but the keyboard and mouse tie me down to the...

One of the great educational treats at holiday time is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s holiday lecture series.  This year will mark the 18th annual presentation, titled “Viral Outbreak: The Science of Emerging Disease.”  There will be four lectures, two each delivered by Dr. Joseph L. DeRisi and Dr. Eva Harris: “Infectious diseases are a serious threat to world health. They are particularly devastating in tropical countries where infectious agents thrive and where healthcare resources are stretched thin. The warming trend in the global climate, coupled with increased...