Technology – JonWestfall.com

Send Automated YouCanBookMe (and other) Appointment Reminders Using Microsoft Flow / Power Automate

byJon Westfall January 24, 2020 Teaching Tips Technology

I have 2 offices, which means that when someone makes an appointment with me, they need to be aware which office I’ll be meeting them at. My appointment provider (YouCanBook.Me) sends an appointment request to both myself and the person making the appointment, and I then update my copy with…

Easy Class Participation Tracking, Grading, Rubric Generation, and More with Excel

byJon Westfall January 24, 2020 Psychology Teaching Tips Technology

One of my classes this semester requires me to track how often students speak in class, and evaluate each comment. I also have students leading discussion, and I need to be able to generate completed rubrics easily for them so they get my feedback. I’ve found that I can keep…

Entry and Exit Tickets in Google Forms / Sheets – Flexible and Fun

byJon Westfall October 28, 2019 Psychology Teaching Tips Technology

Last week I attended a workshop on Differential Education, and realized that I’m already doing something very “differential-ly” – starting this semester in my General Psychology class. Students do a five minute entry ticket each day upon coming into class, and a five minute exit ticket on the way out.…

ProfLife – Being Productive Out of the Office

byJon Westfall April 3, 2019 Personal Psychology Teaching Tips Technology

One of the great things about being a professor is that we’re essentially trained to be project managers – people who are specialists in a given topic area but also trained through graduate school to be self-sufficient. It surprises many to learn that when I’m assigned a course to teach,…

Download All The Music You Could Ever Want, Legally, for $29

byJon Westfall February 10, 2019 Technology

Just a quick post in case you’re old fashion and like downloading actual copies of what you listen to, instead of streaming. I’ve been using this solution for 2-3 years now, and have been pretty happy with it: Find the song you want on YouTube – Pretty much everything is…

Load Data From Your R Script Directly, No Files Needed

byJon Westfall April 17, 2018 Teaching Tips Technology

Ran across this nice little trick a few months back. One of the things I miss about SAS was the ability to copy/paste data directly into a SAS script. While it’s nice to load from an external file, for small datasets it can be more useful to have everything in…

Much Ado About Inbox Zero

byJon Westfall October 20, 2016 Technology

I’ve always been an Inbox Zero kind of guy before Inbox Zero was even a thing. From the time I got my first email address in 1995 to today, I’ve felt that the inbox should be empty nearly 100% of the time (I’ll outline my own exceptions below). Recently I…

What They Aren’t Telling You: San Bernadino Shooter’s iPhone

byJon Westfall February 16, 2016 Technology

USA Today and others made headlines today reporting “Apple ordered to break into San Bernadino shooter’s iPhone”. The topic of government access to encrypted devices has gotten a lot of attention lately, and I’m not writing this post to take a stance on either side. My goal here is to…

Actually Keep a Diary / Journal with Day One and Workflow

byJon Westfall October 29, 2015 Technology

For years I’ve tried to keep a daily diary / journal and have struggled with two problems: Remembering to write, and finding something to write. Lately I’ve tackled the second, and the first is easily solved when you think about it… In this exercise, I’m using 2 apps on iOS:…

Microfiber Cloth To The Rescue – The Best Palm Rejection

byJon Westfall August 17, 2015 Technology

One of the biggest challenges I’ve had when using a stylus on my iPad is the problem of palm rejection. It seems that no software tweak known can keep my palm from screwing up what I’m writing on the iPad. But today I had a revelation – a microfiber cloth…