Thursday, September 25, 2014

Improve Presentations with "Resonate"

Nancy Duarte is a communication expert and the creator of some of the most influential visual messages of our times. Her fabulous book, "Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences," is now available FREE online in multimedia format. This is an extraordinarily well done compilation of techniques for improving presentations.

The free version is available at http://resonate.duarte.com/.


Friday, September 5, 2014

Fix for Firefox Copy/Paste Blackboard Bug

You may recognize this situation: using Firefox, you copy some text from Blackboard or some other website, then you try to paste it into a Blackboard content editor by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-v. But nothing gets pasted! You look at your fingers and the screen in disbelief, mutter a few choice words, then end up trying to find another way to get that text typed in.

If you've been having this problem, there are three options to solve this problem:

  • Option 1: Paste the text into another program, like a text editor, then copy it again from that program and paste it into the Content Editor.
  • Option 2: Use the Chrome browser instead of Firefox.
  • Option 3: Make changes to the advanced configuration in Firefox. Warning - this option is not for the faint of heart or tech challenged.
    1. Open Firefox
    2. Type about:config in the address bar (where you would normally type the URL of a website)
    3. Click the button that says "I'll be careful, I promise!"
    4. Type dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in the search box just above "Preference Name"
    5. Double click the search result item to toggle value from "true" to "false"
    6. Close Firefox
    7. Open Firefox again and login to Blackboard
    8. Test copy/pasting
Please note, you still need to use Ctrl-v to paste instead of right-clicking and this fix has no effect on copy/pasting from Word or programs other than Firefox.