Author: Richard James

Demo-ing Apps in the Classroom

Does anyone have any handy tips they use for demo-ing mobile resources in their workshops and presentations to students, residents, nurses etc? I just happened upon a very neat new (at least to me) feature in Chrome that I had not noticed in the “inspect element” development tool, which I occasionally use to look at source code for troubleshooting purposes. If you’re not confident about, responsible for, or interested in coding intricacies, you may not have ever explored this set of tools, and while there are a number of interesting and useful features for the non-techie person, this trick really jumped out at me as being something that I could immediately incorporate into my everyday work.

Apologies in advance for the many readers who are in institutions that don’t support Chrome. I weep for you daily. For the rest, here are the instructions:

When you right-click on a page in chrome, or CTRL-shift-I, you’ll see an option at the bottom of the list to “inspect element”. There’s an icon in the lower panel of the display, which shows the code, that represents a mobile/tablet device, and which, if clicked, resets the page to display as if it were on such a device. At the top of the page, there is also a drop-down menu with options for specific devices, so you can display a page which emulates the display of different iPhone models, iPads, Android devices- even BlackBerry (in case you are going back in time to do an instruction session.)

While, obviously, the display on-screen in the classroom will be small, if one is discussing mobile resources, there’s something to be said about showing them in their native habitat. Does anyone have a favorite tip or tool that they like to use? I’ve struggled with this in the past and basically given up, because the various emulators that were on-line for this kind of use were not especially reliable and certainly weren’t integrated into the instructional process in the same way. Comment away.

New Krafty Writer

Well, this is exciting….thanks Michelle, for giving me the opportunity to write on your blog. To paraphrase Delaware’s own beloved Joe Biden, this is a big deal.

My name is Richard James, and I am currently the electronic resources librarian at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine- I manage databases and online subscriptions, even a few print journals, for our 100-and-change year old medical college. And like most of our professional brethren and sistren, I do a lot of “other responsibilities include” which will probably be more interesting to blog about.

Prior to my position here, I was an instructional librarian at another Philadelphia college, mostly working with student nurses, and before then, the ILS administrator for the Delaware Division of Libraries. Professionally I’m interested in Open Access, wikipedia and medicine, LGBTQ and diversity issues.