Tech Lore

I've used Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Photos, and Hangouts, but I haven't had the opportunity to use Forms so this week I am going to tackle this versatile Google tool. Google Forms is part of Google's online apps suite of tools that allow you to save, manipulate, and analyze data using version control in your browser. This is amazing for collaboration but can be helpful to individuals too. Forms is essentially a sidekick to Sheets, allowing you to make excellent forms in a matter of minutes. For this post, I decided to create a test Form for students. I work at Lewis-Clark State College in the Registrar's Office. We have many, many paper forms that students have to print or pick up, fill out, and return. Then we process them, scan them, link them to the student, and store them electronically. It's an improvement on manual filing and paper documents but it's still not totally efficient. We use Google Suite for our students' LCMail accounts, so we h...

If you are trying to learn something new, you probably have a pretty good idea of how you learn best. Most of us have studying tactics that have passed the test of time and that we use over and over to promote memorization and comprehension of concepts. Perhaps you took a quiz about what kind of "learner" you are when you were in school and have stuck to the visual/audio/tactile learner trope. Or maybe you have discovered a way to combine learning styles to optimize retention and comprehension. However you learn best, having tools to improve your study habits can make the process far more efficient. When I am learning a new subject, I like to immerse myself in as many ways possible to cover all of my bases. I listen to Podcasts, talk to experts, read about the subject, rewrite ideas in my own words, use mobile apps if available, and of course, make flashcards! Flashcards are a tried and true method of memorizing concepts which is often an important foundational piece of u...

The graduate students are responsible for creating an ebook of all of the technologies we wrote about in our individual papers for the 4407/5507 course. The purpose of the ebook was to have a compiled book of all of our technology tools in one place online that anyone could access. We were given the options to create a website or a wiki, but in the process of researching these we discovered GitBook , which was the perfect tool to create our ebook. I spent some time going through GitBook's tutorials and help pages . GitBook is a command line tool for building books using Git and Markdown. Git is a version control system that tracks changes and coordinates those changes among multiple people. It's usually used for source code management but can be really useful in tracking changes in any set of files. It's non-linear, so the version control is faster and has greater data integrity than something like Google Drive applications, which are designed with version control in m...

We are often told: the higher the reward, the greater the motivation. But what if our motivation comes from something else? What if we aren't motivated by material incentive at all? This video illustrates the "surprising" factors of motivation. But after watching the video, you may find that the information isn't that surprising after all. People are more motivated by purpose, studies found. When given total autonomy, employees were more creative and displayed more motivation. The idea that we are driven to perform better when given more freedom and autonomy is not new. But it certainly does seem to be a difficult concept for many leaders and managers to adhere to. When we are driven to succeed by feelings of purpose and mastery of skills, we are more highly invested in our tasks and more motivated to perform.