Happy Thanksgiving! (and an iMessage tech tip)

Giving thanks for better weather, family on the way, and a reasonably stress-free day so far. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

And the tech tip: if you have an iPhone, iPad, etc. and have been trying to use iMessage (free text messaging among Apple products) without success (like thousands of other frustrated users), try adding 8.8.8.8 as a DNS server number.

To do this:

1. Go to Settings -> Wi-Fi -> (name of your network) and click on the blue arrow. When the screen showing the details of your network opens up, look at the line that says DNS.

2. You will see one or more numbers that look like this: 89.87.61 (or whatever). You might have one or more than one sequence of numbers like this.

3. Add a comma to the last number and type in 8.8.8.8 and exit the screen. Example: 123.333.33, 89.87.61, 8.8.8.8

Some sites say to erase the old DNS numbers, but I just added this one (8.8.8.8) to the string that was there, and now iMessage works.

http://appletoolbox.com/2011/10/ios-5-imessage-not-working-%E2%80%93-how-to-fix/

Grading Papers on the iPad Redux

(Go here for the original post.)

Here's an update, part experiential and part technical. The technical part is here because I hate it when people rhapsodize about doing something on the iPad that you know from experience is tricky to do and then don't tell you how it's done.

The experience: grading on the iPad now doesn't take longer (or much longer), and it's fun. [Update: It now doesn't take any longer, although it would if I were including long explanations of errors as is possible with autotext.]

Experience update

Pro:
1. I invested in a wireless keyboard, which makes the whole typing on the iPad thing much easier and with many fewer typos.
2. I like reading the papers on the iPad. It seems to be easier to get a sense of the big picture of the paper, since the .pdf conversion usually changes double space to single space.
3. I didn't time the papers this time, as I did before, but the cumbersome features that made the process longer last March have largely been eliminated.

Con:
1. There's still no Autotext feature. That means that students have to rely on their handbooks or other aids to look up what may be wrong with a sentence, since I am certainly not going to type out 5 sentences on what a comma splice is every time they write one. On the other hand, we've already talked about these things in class and this isn't their first paper, so perhaps it won't be a problem.
2. There's still a few more transfer/downloading/renaming steps than if I were using Word.

Technical

Importing the papers

First of all, it's not necessary to change the papers (which are usually in Word or some variation) to .pdf using a third-party program. iAnnotate will do that if you open them correctly.

Do NOT try to open them directly in iAnnotate unless they're already in .pdf format; they won't show up.

1. Open Dropbox. Go to the folder where you've stored the student papers.
2. Touch (click on) the paper to open it. It'll show up in the Dropbox window, but tell it to "Open in" iAnnotate. Click on the box with the arrow in the upper right-hand corner to do this. You may have to scroll down to see iAnnotate as an option when the menu for this box opens up.
3. iAnnotate will convert the file to .pdf and then open it.

Marking Up the Papers

Second, write your comments using iAnnotate's commenting features. I don't draw freehand lines and circles, since it's slower for me than just inserting comments, but it's possible to do that.

Update: In addition to using the commenting features, I now mark directly on the .pdf with a stylus. I don't do much with the stylus--circle a few words, add a "good point" in the margins--but the paper looks a little more as though it has been touched with human hands if there's handwriting on it. It's also a more immediate and "natural" way to respond it you're used to writing on paper.

1. To insert a comment, tap on the pencil icon at the side of the screen and tap on Note. You'll then have two choices: Note and Typewriter. Choose Note.

2. Type your comments in the Note space just as you would do with the Word comment feature. [Thanks to Stacey for bringing that up.] It works exactly the same.
3. Click on the minus sign to close the note when you're finished typing.
4. I used to use Typewriter for a final comment, but it shows up as a big black oblong with no text in some readers (like Adobe Acrobat). The Notes, on the other hand, seem to show up fine in Adobe, which is probably what most students have installed.

The Notes will show up in most desktop readers (including Adobe and Preview for Mac) and in iAnnotate but not in Goodreader, NoteTaker, CloudReaders, and other readers for the iPad. You can also "flatten" the annotations so that they'll be more readable. If you "flatten" the annotations, they will show up as a numbered list of comments at the bottom of the page instead of a pop-up message that shows up when students mouse over the comment.

Return the papers

Third, either re-upload the paper to Dropbox or email it to the student. You can email it by clicking on the box, which is on the left side.

But what if you want to re-upload it to Dropbox so that you can later upload the papers to a CMS? This is not an intuitive move in iAnnotate.

• File cabinet icon? No.
• Upload arrow? No. It will tell you that the file has been uploaded to Dropbox, but the file doesn't upload.

You would never guess this one (or at least I couldn't after many attempts), but here's what I found from drilling down on the iAnnotate support site:

1. Click on the file folder-like tab at the top of the document (the Document Context Menu).
2. Click on Share.
3. Click on Upload.
4. Now you'll see your Dropbox account. Click on it and your file will upload.
5. Note: It will probably upload to the iAnnotate folder rather than to the folder from which you downloaded it.

You'll still be stuck with the same filename, since the Gods of Apple Products have an insane prejudice against a Save As feature, but at least you'll have them all where you can rename them and upload them to your CMS or whatever.

Writers' little helpers

Some technological, some not.

First the not-technological:

• First of all, the Another Damned Notorious Writing Group. It really did help to feel as though I needed to accomplish something and check in on Friday.
• Also, the ADNWG inspires bloggers to write about writing, as posts by its cofounders and also Sisyphus, Dr. Crazy, Dr. Virago, Dame Eleanor, and all the comments on the ADNWG posts attest.
• Opposite day. I think I've posted before that my natural time to write is in the evening, by which I mean that I have better concentration and interest then, and I can write more in 2 hours in the evening than in 4 hours during the day. Given every piece of advice on writing ever published, I've been trying very hard to do the "get up in the morning and write" thing, but yesterday I just gave up, did fun class-prep work all day, cruised around on the internet a little, and in the evening finally made the suckitude meter budge in the right direction on this get-it-out-the-door article that I have to finish. I wrote a bunch and can now see the end in sight.

The technological ones:

• Pomodoro. I finally broke down and bought Pomodoro instead of using my regular timer. Somehow, having its alien voice tell me to get started has helped, as has the game-type quality of having it enter the time spent automatically on my calendar.
• Google Calendar. It truly did make a difference when I actually wrote in "Write" as an appointment on writing days. It's all a Jedi mind trick, like the timers, but really, what isn't?
• 750words. It doesn't work for the kinds of editing and rewriting I was doing yesterday, but for generating text that you can then cut into shape, it works well.
• Freedom. Freedom cuts you off from the Internet for a period of time that you specify. The Windows version I tried didn't work, although whether that was due to Freedom or the general haplessness of Vista, I'm not sure. It works well with a Mac but--important--not if you are also running Pomodoro.
• Excel. I know I've posted before about a spreadsheet I keep (on the advice of Boice & Silvia) listing word counts for the day & a brief description of what I did. I recently opened a new workbook page and started keeping track just of the time I started with the beginning and ending word counts. I used to do this on paper, but except for planning and editing, I haven't felt like writing much on paper lately, and this works.

I do realize these are all toys to keep me entertained while I get to work, little shiny technological carrots, so to speak, but if they work, they work. I'm saving learning about Scrivener, which I own but can't figure out yet, for the next big writing push.

A nice moment and a tech tip

Today I did something I don't do often enough: I went to each of the rooms where I'm scheduled to teach and checked to see if I could get the technology to work with my computer.

Since it was a Friday afternoon and school hasn't started yet, no one was in the classrooms. They were cool and dark until I switched on the lights, and the rooms had those freshly waxed floors that are never as clean as they are at the beginning of the semester. There's also that feeling of mild outlawry in walking into an empty classroom and taking charge of it, knowing that if anyone challenged me I'd just tell them I was a professor and they'd go away.

This was a geektastic little tour, too, because I figured out how to get everything to work--the computer, the iPad, doc camera, projector, and even sound, which is sometimes a dicey proposition. I tried PowerPoint, web pages, Keynote, and Youtube, playing "Trouble in River City" from The Music Man in all three of the rooms and wandering to the back to see what students would see from various angles.

Here is the nice moment: as I was in the largest of the rooms (before playing the YouTube clips), students kept wandering in singly or in pairs. They'd walk around a bit, look at the desks, and then leave. Some of them talked to me a little: "Hi, are you a professor? I'm just checking out the room before classes start." It was good to see students doing that, and it reminded me that we were both doing the same thing, in a way--trying to get acclimated to the space a little before classes start.

Here is the tech tip, as passed along to me by the Apple geniuses: some time in the spring of 2010, a MacOS upgrade made all the power settings on the laptop default to California power-saving standards, which sounds all eco-worthy and green except that if you were projecting video of any sort, the video on the screen at the front of the room was so dark that students couldn't see it, even if the laptop was plugged in. The same automatic darkening occurred when students would present their work and embed a video clip. I knew something had happened and figured out that it was probably somebody's idea of a feature rather than a bug, but it was maddening because there was no cure for it.

The Apple genius told me that it was a common problem and that this is the way to fix it: go to the battery icon (Energy Saver Preferences), and change the settings from "Better Battery Life" to "Higher Performance" under "Power Adapter." You will have to restart and log in again (not just log in again), but that should fix the settings temporarily. The settings will revert to "Better Battery Life" even if the computer isn't running on battery, so you will have to repeat the process if you shut down the computer.

This fix seemed to work today, so let's hope that it works if I show video in class this year. The last time, students tried to watch a movie that looked like Godfather II seen through goggles filled with dark coffee, and even their young eyes couldn't make out the murky doings on the screen.

How to Put a PowerPoint onto an iPad

Say you already have some PowerPoint presentations that you use for classes (I mostly have pictures for the class to analyze), and you want to try using them on the iPad. Here's the problem: even if you have Keynote on your iPad, if you don't have Keynote on your main computer because it's not a Mac, Apple won't let you transfer the files via iTunes.

Here is a workaround that's probably known to thousands of people, but since I just figured it out, you get to read about it here.

1. Using Dropbox, go to the presentation. (You can also email it to yourself and open it on the iPad.) Once it's downloaded, click on the little box with an arrow in the upper right-hand corner ("Open in"). Choose Keynote.

2. It will download into Keynote, with a few warnings that the font might look different.

3. Tap on the presentation to open it. That's all there is to it.

4. You can edit the presentation in Keynote (add presenter notes, change the text, etc.), but apparently you can't save it back to Dropbox. To get the new edition on your main computer, click on the little wrench and go to Share and Print. You can save it as a keynote file, as a .pdf, or as a PowerPoint file and email it to yourself.

5. Now here is the awesome part: say you want to leave your iPad up at the podium and walk around while you show the PowerPoint. If you have an iPhone,you can use your iPhone as a remote control for the slides if you download and install Keynote Remote. Both devices have to be on the same wireless network, which shouldn't be a problem in a classroom.

If you have a separate Bluetooth Apple remote, it doesn't appear to work with the iPad (or at least I couldn't get it to work).

I learned about this in the comments on one of Pogue's posts at the NYTimes. Pogue also talks about something called "presenter view," which I had never heard of before: although the audience sees just the slide, you can see your notes and a preview of the next slide. You get to "presenter view" by going to Slide Show, Set Up Show in PowerPoint.

Grading papers with the iPad

Read the updated post with some technical advice here:
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2011/11/grading-papers-on-ipad-redux.html

Around the web, there've been some posts lately about grading with the iPad, including a couple of good ones by Caleb McDaniel and Michael J. Faris. I was curious about this, so I thought I'd try grading on the iPad and see how it went.

[Update: There's a new post up about this by Janet Johnson at MediaRhetoric.com; she talks about iAnnotate, which she finds easier to use than Word. She also uses some other grading apps, including GradebookPro and EssayGrader, which is sort of like Markin for the iPad.]

My initial thought was to do a whole set the usual way (comments in Word) and a whole set using iAnnotate on the iPad, but I ended up doing just a few on the iPad. It was pretty clear what the strengths and weaknesses were after that. Here's the process:

1. To use iAnnotate for grading, you first need to download the papers (if your students use Word), convert them to .pdf files, and save them to Dropbox. That took about a minute apiece. You don't have to save them to Dropbox if you don't have it; you can transfer them through iTunes, which is the official way to transfer files on the iPad, or through a transfer feature of iAnnotate.

2. Open iAnnotate on the iPad and read the paper. iAnnotate lets you insert comments in little pop-up boxes, use a pencil tool to circle items, underline phrases, and so on.

• You can use your fingers to indicate the text you want highlighted by swiping the text or pressing and holding until the program asks you whether you want to make a note or not.

• If you have a stylus, you can also write on the paper, although even my best efforts at writing letters looked like those of a 4-year-old.
• For each comment, you need to click on the appropriate icon on the sidebar (underline, make a note), click in the right spot in the text, type the note, close the note, and close the annotation menu.

3. Typing on the iPad isn't as straightforward or as fast as typing on a physical keyboard, although it does work. For one thing, if you want to use an apostrophe, you have to go to a different keyboard, although some of the usual contractions (it's, I'll, etc.) will insert themselves automatically.

4. At the end, you can upload the file back to Dropbox or mail it directly to the student. There's no "save" or "save as" feature (or at least I haven't been able to find one), but iAnnotate saves the annotated file automatically. If you like to save the graded papers with a different filename, as I do, you'll have to change the filename on your regular computer.

Note: If your students email you their papers in .pdf format and you mark them up in iAnnotate, you won't be able to save that version to Dropbox. Dropbox only accepts the annotated version if it originated in Dropbox, apparently a known issue with the two programs.

5. I used the Typewriter comment feature to write the final comment. [Note: See the updated post (above) about using Note instead.]

6. If you email the file, there are two options: one "flattens" the annotations, which means that the student sees a little yellow comment box with a number and the comments are down below, and one that the student should be able to see using the pop-ups.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

1. Draw. Most of the information I've seen lists "not carrying around a stack of papers," "no messy writing in the margins," etc. as an advantage, but since I'm collecting and returning papers electronically, that's not an issue.

2. Advantage: It's kind of cool to grade on the iPad. If I have the iPad with me anyway, I might as well carry some grading to do.

3. Disadvantage: No Word autotext on the iPad. No magic keystrokes that insert text (Alt-I-A-X). That makes a huge difference, since I use it to explain common problems and can then spend a lot more time on substantive issues.

4. Advantage: No computer to lug around. On the other hand, I have an old-ish netbook that, like the iPad, fits in my pocketbook, so it's really kind of a draw if portability is the issue.

5. Disadvantage: Grading takes longer. Total average time: if N = the amount of time that it takes to grade a paper in Word or on paper, the iPad version took me N + 9 minutes, on average. I did the math: 9 extra minutes apiece x 30 papers = time I could spend doing something else.

6. Disadvantage: Typing is less intuitive, and I noticed that my shoulders were getting all hunched up with the effort to type and not make mistakes.

7. Draw: The CMS my university uses does not play well at all with the iPad; there's no way to scroll down or upload the papers to the dropbox space in the CMS. On the other hand, if you're emailing papers back anyway, this may not be a problem.

Tech tools and writing inspiration

From BoingBoing, via Academhack, comes Steven Johnson's account of "How to write a book" (it's all worth reading, but I've cut it up here because I don't want to steal the whole thing):

The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text -- and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink . . .

When it comes time to actually write the book, I usually have a pretty clear sense of how the chapters are going to be divided up. . . . And so in the last stage before I actually start writing, I create a little folder in Devonthink for each of the chapters. And then I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I've uncovered over the past year or so of research. But I read through them all, and in reading through them all, I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of hints or hunches.

. . . I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It's a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

I've never used Devonthink because I don't have a Mac. I've tried Evernote (seemed cumbersome) and OneNote (but I only have a trial version), but I keep coming back to plain old Word, which I use in somewhat the same way. Mostly, however, I rely on a blizzard of Post-It notes stuck in books that are piled 6 deep all around my desk, typed notes, scraps written during dull conference presentations, and so on.

Do these tools really make a difference? Or is it the part I've bolded at the end, about starting in a file already full of notes, that makes the difference? Do any of you use these tools?

Grading translation

As I finish grading the last projects for the summer course, I've invented a new comment to use (thanks, autotext!). I won't write the real version of it, but Spouse, to whom I showed it, translated it as follows: "I am tired of commenting on this mistake, which you have made numerous times before, and so I am not going to comment on it henceforth in this paper. This won't stop me from considering it when I assign your grade, however."

My version is more polite and positive, but you get the idea.

And again: thanks, autotext! I have been looking longingly at Macs recently, but they come with some flavor of Word 2007/2008, and I can't find the autotext feature at all. This is a dealbreaker for me.*

*P. S. Autotext isn't autotext if you have to use a mouse. Real backwoods computer users should be able to get everywhere--everywhere in Word, anyway--by using the keyboard. I learned this back in pioneer days with WordPerfect 5.1 (Anybody remember that? Hello? Hello?), where flying fingers and function keys were the name of the game.

OT: Tech tips--why the fuss over Roku?

Updated to add: This reads very differently in 2021, when I am totally in love with Roku and it is my friend.

I'm confused about the fuss over Roku, a box that allows you to watch streaming video from Netflix for only $8.95 a month. The reason I'm confused is that Netflix members can already do this for free. You have to have Internet Explorer (it won't work with Firefox) and download the free player, but as far as I know, Netflix members have just about unlimited viewing for free. And the TV part? You just need to hook up the laptop to your TV as if it's an external monitor using an SVGA cable [or an S-video cable] and an audio cable. If you had an HDMI cable and a port for that on your laptop, you could probably use that, not that I've ever been able to make an HDMI cable work. Fellow tech nerd souls, what am I missing here? [Updated to add] An anonymous commenter has kindly explained that the $8.95 is for the cheapest Netflix subscription; if you already have Netflix, you wouldn't have to pay an additional amount to use Roku, just the $99 to buy it to begin with. Although the current system works well for now (laptop cables to TV), it sounds as though Roku might be worth a look. [Updated 4/24/09]: If you have a newer laptop with an HDMI port, an HDMI cable works even better than an SVGA or VGA cable plus audio cable.]

OT: Tech tips--Xobni and Autotext

These are probably not news to everyone, but they are to me, so I thought I'd mention them here.

Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is an indexer for Outlook. I usually use Google Desktop to find things, but this is faster. (Also, Google Desktop will sometimes tell you that you do have a message from the person you're looking for but won't open it, tantalizing you with its vagueness.) When you click on a message in your inbox, Xobni tells you the person's phone number (if the person has ever sent it in an e-mail) as well as telling you who else is in this person's "network." This freaked me out a little at first, because I thought there was some kind of web magic involved, but it turns out that it's all based on what's in your inbox already.

Autotext in Word. I've been using Word for years, but this was a revelation; it's perfect for inserting repetitive text ("You need a comma here") into student papers. If you're still running Word 2003--and everyone I know who has 2007 wants desperately to go back to the 2003 version--here's what you do:

1. Highlight the chunk of text you want to have as autotext.
2. Click on Insert, Autotext, New.
3. Give it a name in the box that pops up.
4. To use Autotext, Click on Insert, Autotext, Autotext, and scroll down until you find the short name that you gave it. I kept all the names to 2-5 letters for maximum speed.

Now, if you're like me and would prefer a faster way to do this than messing around with the mouse and toolbar, try this keyboard shortcut:
Alt-I-A-X and type your short name. The autotext appears in the document.
Want to put this into a comment? First, insert the comment: Alt-I-M. Then Alt-I-A-X (these don't have to be capital letters) and the short name.

I had never tried Autotext because of being scarred by Word macros at a tender age. To this day, one of my ancient computers has a copy of Word that, when you open it, opens Visual Basic first and demands that the macro be completed or canceled. I obviously screwed up the macro-making process badly at some point but could never get Visual Basic to stop harassing me. If I'd only known about Autotext, I'd have realized that I didn't need a macro after all and have spared myself two years of shutting down Visual Basic before I could open a document.

The benefit of all this is that I am, yes, actually looking forward to the first set of assignments from the summer school class because I'll get to practice my mad Autotext skillz on them.