Tag Archives: Technology

calendar, tech tip, Write6x6

Tech Tip: Use Time-Blocking – Please!

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This might be a personal request of all faculty I have the pleasure of working with. With all of us working from home a lot more and possibly only being on campus two days a week, it’s challenging trying to find time to meet with people. It’s so nice when I can just pull up a calendar invite, add the people I want to meet with, and choose “Find a Time." It magically presents everyone's calendar revealing all the common free time. This, people, is how most organizations work. However, we don’t even come close. Most of the time there is nothing listed on faculty calendars. Oh, so you’re free on Wednesday at 2 pm. That’s perfect. Well, that’s usually not the case. My tiny tech tip is to leverage your digital calendar tools to implement time-blocking strategies. In addition to simply listing your class, office hours, and meeting times, allocate specific blocks of time for different tasks, such as grading, research, and class preparation. This helps in creating a structured schedule and enhances focus on specific activities during dedicated time slots. It also allows for better visualization of your day and ensures that important tasks are given the attention they deserve. But most importantly to me, your colleague, is now I know when I can request a meeting with you. If you’re still available for meeting requests but you’ve blocked off time to grade, you can indicate that you are still free on the calendar event. It’s quite simple. So what do say? Can we please use our calendars?
AI, ChaptGPT, grading, Write6x6

Can AI Grade My Essays For Me?

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I made a joke with Beth a few days ago about how I wished AI would grade my essays for me. And then I really thought about that, and now I can’t stop. I mean seriously if AI can write the students’ papers for them, what about us? Why can’t it grade papers too? Well, guess what. It can. I tried it. Shhh. Now don’t tell on me. I used both ChatGPT and Microsoft’s tool built into Bing. GPT is much better.

First off, it was a lot of work, probably equal to if I’d just graded them myself, but the benefit was far better for the student. It spat out paragraph long feedback on what was wrong, how the paper did or didn’t meet each rubric standard, and how to improve the work. I was simply amazed. If I were to leave that kind of feedback on a paper, it would take me days to grade instead of hours. As it is, I’ve already moved to grading by recording my feedback, so I can say more and make it easier for students to understand what I’m saying, but this was amazing.

But like a said. It wasn’t easy or quick. I first began by asking the AI to find a rubric for a news article using a summary lead and following the inverted pyramid style. It quickly pulled up a rubric that was adequate, but it was only on a 10-point scale. I used it anyway to see how it would work. Then my next prompt asked Maud, remember, I named her Maud in my last post. I asked her to grade this news article using that rubric, and pasted in a student’s news article. Surprisingly, it worked. She put the two prompts together and graded the article. It was okay, but there wasn’t much detail and it didn’t really meet the standards I was looking for. I decided instead to ask Maud to build me a rubric and added the essential things and the total points I needed. She created this.

Okay, that was interesting, but could she grade a news article using that rubric? I wondered. Yep! She gave the article a 47/60, provided the tally from the rubric AND added this feedback:

Strengths:

  • The article follows the inverted pyramid structure.
  • The information provided is relevant to the target audience.
  • The article includes quotes from reliable sources.

Weaknesses:

  • The lead is weak and could benefit from being more focused.
  • The article could use more clarity in its presentation of information.
  • The article could be more concise.
  • The article could be more explicit in identifying biases or opinions.

Suggestions for Improvement:

  • The lead should be more specific and focused on the key point of the article.
  • The article should be more clear and concise, with shorter paragraphs and simpler language.
  • The author should explicitly identify any biases or opinions and explain how they might influence the article’s content.
  • The author should consider additional sources to provide a more complete understanding of the issue.

Crazy, right? I probably would have scored it a bit higher, but I noticed Maud didn’t say anything about grammar and punctuation in her feedback and I found a couple of specific errors, so I asked her about them. I typed in, “What about grammar and punctuation?” She replied:

As an AI language model, I don’t have the capability to fully analyze grammar and punctuation, but I can tell you that there are a few errors in the article. For example, in the sentence “This issue goes for not only students but members of the community who live downtown,” the phrase “goes for” should be replaced with “applies to.” Additionally, there are a few instances where punctuation could be improved for clarity and readability. Overall, however, the article is well-written and understandable.

She was right. In another instance, Maud pointed out two run-on sentences in the article and offered a suggestion for how to fix it. Amazing.

Yep, I’m obsessed, but that took a lot of work. In fact, I paused playing so I could quickly grade those news articles and get them back to students. This was going to take all day. First, Maud would forget my rubric after a few follow-up questions about the article she graded, so I’d have to start all over. Then sometimes she would ignore my rubric and just give a paragraph analysis of the article or she would leave out key elements. Basically, she was not consistent and I had to keep retraining her. She gave good feedback, but not the same feedback for each student.

Living, Write6x6

Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech

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I wake up to the first morning light, my brain recently bathed in glorious REM sleep. The restorative powers of sleep are legion: memory consolidation, increased problem-solving abilities, boosted immune functioning to name a few. There is evidence the brain performs a sort of housecleaning during shut-eye, making morning a ripe time for starting out the day with renewed clarity and potential.

So what do I do? Before my feet hit the floor, I grab my cell phone off the bedside table and let the fresh horrors of the overnight world infiltrate my blissfully open mind.

I tell myself that I am checking my phone because I have children. (But they are in their early 30’s, y’all.) Then, I see a red flag indicating I have e-mail, and without thinking I click to open it. And, while I’m here, I might as well check Facebook . . .

I know none of this is good. First, any student who e-mails me overnight is not writing to say what a wonderful teacher I am. Instead, it’s that there’s been a death in the family or they just plain forgot they had an assignment due at 11:59pm. And don’t get me started on how scrolling social media can affect mood.

I noticed a tendency to feel tethered to tech when I started teaching online full-time about five years ago. I had a gnawing sense that I needed to be able to respond to students at all hours of the day (and night). I thought that since I wasn’t actually teaching in-person, the tradeoff was making myself widely available to students.

So, I found myself reaching for my phone at stoplights, while I waited for my coffee, pretty much any time my brain was idle for a minute. Heaven forbid I should be left alone with my thoughts.

What I found, however, is that I was feeling exhausted all the time as an online teacher. I felt overwhelmed and a tad resentful. It seemed like I could never “catch up.” I know I’m not alone in this. Many teachers feel like their workdays never end, and that is because they don’t. Tech has a frightening way of blurring day into night, weekdays into weekends, our 40s into our 50s . . .

Over time I have discovered that most of the angst in my life can be traced to boundaries. According to Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, the definition of boundaries is, “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.” Thus, a tech boundary is one set for your relationship with yourself.

Okay, so just set a tech boundary. I’ll just tell myself I won’t pick up my phone at the slightest hint of ennui. Easy, right?

Not so fast. What makes this a struggle is we battle our brain’s reward system when we fight tech. The little red dot with a number on it is anything but innocuous; it is there to prompt us to lay eyes on the alert. Tech shapes our behavior by hijacking the reward system.

So what’s the reward associated with opening overnight e-mail?  It actually might be the positive rush of seeing that there is, to quote my cop-husband, “nothing to see here” – that good feeling of realizing there are no fires to extinguish.

In her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, author Wendy Wood writes about creating “friction” around behaviors we want to discourage. In this way, we interrupt habits that are deeply grooved in our neural pathways. Here are some ideas I’m working on for putting friction between me and tech:

  • Remove work e-mail from my phone and home devices. This works as long as I don’t circumvent by logging into e-mail using my phone’s browser.
  • Alternatively, remove e-mail notifications from all devices. Can’t quite remove e-mail from your phone altogether? Disable the notifications that keep us coming back.
  • Designate three periods a day for checking e-mail. I am more successful with this on some days than others. But, I find I am more focused when I am not trying to multi-task.
  • Put my phone where it can’t be accessed quickly. I’m not as likely to grab my phone at every stop light if it isn’t right there on the console. At the grocery store, I can put my phone at the bottom of my bag.

The other day, while waiting for coffee at my local shop, I instantly reached for my phone and thought better of it. Even if there is an e-mail I need to respond to, must I do it right now? Instead, I immersed myself in the artwork on the walls and felt a better kind of rush.

Up next week – musings on setting time boundaries as a teacher.

The post Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech appeared first on My Love of Learning.

Living, Write6x6

Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech

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I wake up to the first morning light, my brain recently bathed in glorious REM sleep. The restorative powers of sleep are legion: memory consolidation, increased problem-solving abilities, boosted immune functioning to name a few. There is evidence the brain performs a sort of housecleaning during shut-eye, making morning a ripe time for starting out the day with renewed clarity and potential.

So what do I do? Before my feet hit the floor, I grab my cell phone off the bedside table and let the fresh horrors of the overnight world infiltrate my blissfully open mind.

I tell myself that I am checking my phone because I have children. (But they are in their early 30’s, y’all.) Then, I see a red flag indicating I have e-mail, and without thinking I click to open it. And, while I’m here, I might as well check Facebook . . .

I know none of this is good. First, any student who e-mails me overnight is not writing to say what a wonderful teacher I am. Instead, it’s that there’s been a death in the family or they just plain forgot they had an assignment due at 11:59pm. And don’t get me started on how scrolling social media can affect mood.

I noticed a tendency to feel tethered to tech when I started teaching online full-time about five years ago. I had a gnawing sense that I needed to be able to respond to students at all hours of the day (and night). I thought that since I wasn’t actually teaching in-person, the tradeoff was making myself widely available to students.

So, I found myself reaching for my phone at stoplights, while I waited for my coffee, pretty much any time my brain was idle for a minute. Heaven forbid I should be left alone with my thoughts.

What I found, however, is that I was feeling exhausted all the time as an online teacher. I felt overwhelmed and a tad resentful. It seemed like I could never “catch up.” I know I’m not alone in this. Many teachers feel like their workdays never end, and that is because they don’t. Tech has a frightening way of blurring day into night, weekdays into weekends, our 40s into our 50s . . .

Over time I have discovered that most of the angst in my life can be traced to boundaries. According to Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, the definition of boundaries is, “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.” Thus, a tech boundary is one set for your relationship with yourself.

Okay, so just set a tech boundary. I’ll just tell myself I won’t pick up my phone at the slightest hint of ennui. Easy, right?

Not so fast. What makes this a struggle is we battle our brain’s reward system when we fight tech. The little red dot with a number on it is anything but innocuous; it is there to prompt us to lay eyes on the alert. Tech shapes our behavior by hijacking the reward system.

So what’s the reward associated with opening overnight e-mail?  It actually might be the positive rush of seeing that there is, to quote my cop-husband, “nothing to see here” – that good feeling of realizing there are no fires to extinguish.

In her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, author Wendy Wood writes about creating “friction” around behaviors we want to discourage. In this way, we interrupt habits that are deeply grooved in our neural pathways. Here are some ideas I’m working on for putting friction between me and tech:

  • Remove work e-mail from my phone and home devices. This works as long as I don’t circumvent by logging into e-mail using my phone’s browser.
  • Alternatively, remove e-mail notifications from all devices. Can’t quite remove e-mail from your phone altogether? Disable the notifications that keep us coming back.
  • Designate three periods a day for checking e-mail. I am more successful with this on some days than others. But, I find I am more focused when I am not trying to multi-task.
  • Put my phone where it can’t be accessed quickly. I’m not as likely to grab my phone at every stop light if it isn’t right there on the console. At the grocery store, I can put my phone at the bottom of my bag.

The other day, while waiting for coffee at my local shop, I instantly reached for my phone and thought better of it. Even if there is an e-mail I need to respond to, must I do it right now? Instead, I immersed myself in the artwork on the walls and felt a better kind of rush.

Up next week – musings on setting time boundaries as a teacher.

The post Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech appeared first on My Love of Learning.

Living, Write6x6

Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech

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I wake up to the first morning light, my brain recently bathed in glorious REM sleep. The restorative powers of sleep are legion: memory consolidation, increased problem-solving abilities, boosted immune functioning to name a few. There is evidence the brain performs a sort of housecleaning during shut-eye, making morning a ripe time for starting out the day with renewed clarity and potential.

So what do I do? Before my feet hit the floor, I grab my cell phone off the bedside table and let the fresh horrors of the overnight world infiltrate my blissfully open mind.

I tell myself that I am checking my phone because I have children. (But they are in their early 30’s, y’all.) Then, I see a red flag indicating I have e-mail, and without thinking I click to open it. And, while I’m here, I might as well check Facebook . . .

I know none of this is good. First, any student who e-mails me overnight is not writing to say what a wonderful teacher I am. Instead, it’s that there’s been a death in the family or they just plain forgot they had an assignment due at 11:59pm. And don’t get me started on how scrolling social media can affect mood.

I noticed a tendency to feel tethered to tech when I started teaching online full-time about five years ago. I had a gnawing sense that I needed to be able to respond to students at all hours of the day (and night). I thought that since I wasn’t actually teaching in-person, the tradeoff was making myself widely available to students.

So, I found myself reaching for my phone at stoplights, while I waited for my coffee, pretty much any time my brain was idle for a minute. Heaven forbid I should be left alone with my thoughts.

What I found, however, is that I was feeling exhausted all the time as an online teacher. I felt overwhelmed and a tad resentful. It seemed like I could never “catch up.” I know I’m not alone in this. Many teachers feel like their workdays never end, and that is because they don’t. Tech has a frightening way of blurring day into night, weekdays into weekends, our 40s into our 50s . . .

Over time I have discovered that most of the angst in my life can be traced to boundaries. According to Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, the definition of boundaries is, “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.” Thus, a tech boundary is one set for your relationship with yourself.

Okay, so just set a tech boundary. I’ll just tell myself I won’t pick up my phone at the slightest hint of ennui. Easy, right?

Not so fast. What makes this a struggle is we battle our brain’s reward system when we fight tech. The little red dot with a number on it is anything but innocuous; it is there to prompt us to lay eyes on the alert. Tech shapes our behavior by hijacking the reward system.

So what’s the reward associated with opening overnight e-mail?  It actually might be the positive rush of seeing that there is, to quote my cop-husband, “nothing to see here” – that good feeling of realizing there are no fires to extinguish.

In her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, author Wendy Wood writes about creating “friction” around behaviors we want to discourage. In this way, we interrupt habits that are deeply grooved in our neural pathways. Here are some ideas I’m working on for putting friction between me and tech:

  • Remove work e-mail from my phone and home devices. This works as long as I don’t circumvent by logging into e-mail using my phone’s browser.
  • Alternatively, remove e-mail notifications from all devices. Can’t quite remove e-mail from your phone altogether? Disable the notifications that keep us coming back.
  • Designate three periods a day for checking e-mail. I am more successful with this on some days than others. But, I find I am more focused when I am not trying to multi-task.
  • Put my phone where it can’t be accessed quickly. I’m not as likely to grab my phone at every stop light if it isn’t right there on the console. At the grocery store, I can put my phone at the bottom of my bag.

The other day, while waiting for coffee at my local shop, I instantly reached for my phone and thought better of it. Even if there is an e-mail I need to respond to, must I do it right now? Instead, I immersed myself in the artwork on the walls and felt a better kind of rush.

Up next week – musings on setting time boundaries as a teacher.

The post Teaching Boundaries, Part I – Tech appeared first on My Love of Learning.

Write6x6

My Heart Just Wasn’t In It After Day 1

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I taught my first face-to-face class in two years 3 weeks ago. It’s a late start ENG102 hybrid that meets once a week in LA108. I didn’t really want to teach the class face-to-face, but my chair said that admin would like us to have more on-campus classes this semester. “The data show that is what students want.” I saw the data and had a completely different interpretation, but I’m a team player, so I agreed to teach the class. It is one of the two classes I previously taught on campus in 2020, so the class was prepared and ready to go.

The first indication that things were going to be different is when I noticed I wasn’t teaching in my preferred space. Apparently, HT2 classrooms were not big enough to accommodate our class sizes (18). I was bummed but verified I’d have a Chromebook cart in my new teaching space. On the first day, I arrived about 15 minutes early just so I could familiarize myself with the technology in the classroom. I’d promised students I would do a live-online class so students who couldn’t make it to class for whatever reason could attend live from home. I also have the same course as an all online and thought it might be nice to offer the option to them. Turns out LA108 is a cave with no cell service. You might think that fact is not that important, but trust me it is.

I began by trying to log into the teacher station computer, which I haven’t had to do since Duo Two-Factor Authentication was introduced into our lives last year along with having better log-in passwords. I had found a loophole and was successful in using the same password for probably 3 years. I should be ashamed, but I wasn’t. I actually knew my password back in the day BC (Before Covid). Today, not so much. My souped-up 17 digit numbers and symbols are a solid password now. So I looked up my password on my phone using my LastPass app; I have offline access on my phone, and I typed it into the prompt on the computer at the teacher station. The computer went into some weird realm that took probably 5-6 minutes before it stopped and prompted me for a user name and password again. Again? I looked it up again and typed all the letters, symbols, and numbers again. After another ridiculous amount of time, you know what happened. No, it worked, but our new friend Duo popped up. I asked Duo to send me a text. She goes into spin mode waiting for me to complete the action on my phone. Nothing appears on my watch or phone. So I kindly ask Duo to send me another text. And then again. By this time I have about 5 students sitting in front of me watching. Duo never complies so I give up on that endeavor.

I thought to myself, I don’t need your crappy technology. I’ve got a backpack full of it sitting at my feet. We are about 10 minutes into class time at this point when I realized I needed to log into the WiFi on campus if anything was going to happen today – my first day back in the classroom after 2 years. That wasn’t going to happen, so Maricopa net or whatever the open wifi is called was it. Fifteen minutes into my first class, with 5 students sitting in front of me, and one single person online, I was finally ready to teach. I learned later that several students gave up on the online class when I wasn’t there to let them in. Bummer. But hey I was ready. I say to the students in front of me. Let me just “plug” my laptop into the teacher station and you’ll be able to see my screen. I had already started teaching but had no visual for them yet.

Let me ask you a question before I continue. Does anyone have one of these plugs on their computer anymore? Oh, never mind. The whole point of this post is to point out how I was done after day one. And I can’t say that the following week was any better. I had a whole new set of problems. I’m so out of practice with trying to use someone else’s technology that my heart is just not into teaching face to face anymore. It ruined my experience. Technology should enhance, not prohibit. Apparently, you need cell service in order to get Duo prompts or be logged in to wifi on a computer to get a password to log into the computer. Or you need to remember to put your dongle in your backpack so you can connect your fancy technology to the old school kind in the classroom. Or…(fill in the blank). It’s just too much to deal with. I need to stick with what I do best and tackling GCC technology ain’t it.

P.S. Thank you Caryn Bird for hiding whiteboard markers in the classroom because of course you have to bring your own low tech too.

engaging students, flipgrid, SoftChalk, video, Write6x6

Okay, All Your Students are Online. Now What?

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I still chuckle when I think about every teacher I work with is now doing some form of remote or online teaching. I know it’s not a laughing matter, but I can’t help it. After spending four years as eCourses coordinator at the college, I know the reality of that statement. I’m sure everyone is doing their best. However, I can’t help but think about that select few who wanted to teach online because they thought it would be easy. Well, it’s not so easy after all, especially when you only get two weeks to do it.

It’s easy to post content (documents) online, and most LMS’s make it easy to record video and audio. But the hardest part is engaging students. How do you even know they are watching, listening or reading what you put online? I hope I’m not freaking people out, but trust me, they’re not watching, listening and reading all that stuff you just put in Canvas. They are just looking for the stuff the “counts.” I know I sound pessimistic, but I speak from experience. When I first started teaching online over 15 years ago, the first thing I noticed was that if there was no point value attached, it got ignored. That included textbook chapters, handouts, content pages in Canvas, and yes, even YouTube videos. I was shocked. They don’t like my videos? Did anyone even watch them?

I couldn’t really tell if students were engaging or not with my content, but they were missing huge gaps in knowledge that would have come from engaging with that content. I constantly found myself asking in my feedback, “Did you watch the video?” or “Did you read the handout?” It was definitely frustrating especially since I made a ton of videos. Once I got fed up with that I decided to change the design of my courses. I now have several different formats depending on the course. I made a couple of videos showing how I changed things up that you can watch below, but I’ll summarize here first.

For my ENH114 African American literature class where reading is crucial (Duh!), I changed the course so that every reading is an assignment. Yes, you read that right. Every single reading is an assignment. I call them lessons, and each lesson either has reading handouts, video or audio and then something for students to do. For example, in Lesson 1.1.1 Origins of African American Language, students watch a YouTube video and then write a summary about what they learned. Simple. I create this by using Assignments in Canvas, embed the video, write my instructions and then set the assignment to accept text and uploads for submission. The best part is I didn’t have to make the video. Thank you internet and YouTube.

Another example from the ENH114 class is a lecture I wanted students to read. Again, I made it a lesson: Lesson 1.2.1 Importance of Negro Spirituals that included a recording of me reading the lecture as well as the text of the lecture, and then asks students to answer a question about the content. I use rubrics so the students know what I’m looking for, and it makes it easier for me to grade. The idea that everything I want students to do is graded in some way can be daunting, but using rubrics makes quick work of it. I’ll demonstrate more ways that I engage students in this class in the video below.

For my freshman comp classes, I have a slightly different approach. Not everything I want for them to read and do is made into a lesson, but I do wish that would work. However, I do consistently make some of the content into lessons. You really need to have something for students to engage with on a weekly basis. If you don’t, students get in the habit of “skipping” weeks. Having assignments with weekly due dates draws them into the course. They don’t have to be much, just something that says, “Hey, remember you have this English class over here.” You can see more from these courses in the video below. You can find the YouTube Series I mention here: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information.

Lastly, I teach a hybrid (used to teach a hybrid) JRN203: Writing for Online Media course. Luckily for me, I design all my courses as online courses, so I only had to make a few adjustments in this course to transition to online. The biggest change was adding more online discussions. Oh, I know. That sounds so boring, especially since students hate online discussions. But these discussions are fun. I use FlipGrid. It’s a social learning platform that allows educators to ask a question, then the students respond in a video. Students are then able to respond to one another, creating a “web” of video discussion. They’re fun and students really like these discussions. Some are a little shy at first, but they quickly get over it. I got permission from my students to show a discussion they are working on currently in class. See below.

The reality of the situation is I didn’t create all of this in two weeks. These are things I’ve added as I’ve taught over the years. For many faculty out there now rushing to move content online, my best advice is to pick one thing you can add now to help engage students, and as the semester continues on, consider what else you might be able to add. You can’t do it all now, but just one thing might prove helpful.

Engaging Students in JRN203 with FlipGrid
ENH114 Course Using Canvas, Softchalk, and FlipGrid
ENG101 Composition Course Using Canvas,
McGraw-Hill Connect & YouTube
explain everything, ipad, notability, recording audio, remote teaching, whiteboard, Write6x6

Remote Teaching: More Questions Answered

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So I’ve gotten a few more questions from faculty about moving content online. The questions are good questions indicating that they have the right idea about adding audio and video. After posting on Instagram about using my iPad in some of my videos, Mary wanted to know if I could record live using Notability in a Google Hangout. I don’t usually do it that way, but I was curious too, so I tried it. Notability is a notetaking app on the iPad. It works like a digital whiteboard if you have an Apple pencil. I use it to show students how to correct errors in their papers. I’ll pull up a document that has sentences double spaced and use my pen to show how you can add a comma and conjunction to a run-on sentence and make it a compound sentence, for example. I usually just do these alone and record the screen using the built-in recording feature on the iPad. I can also do the same thing using Explain Everything Whiteboard, but that is not free ($25).

Anyway, this method of recording videos is perfect for the instructor who likes to write on the board while teaching. I don’t do that often, but when I do students like it. Here’s an example of How to Write a Basic Essay that I created in Explain Everything. Now back to Mary’s question. Yes, you can log into a Google Hangout Meet session on your iPad, start presenting, open the Notability app and start writing. As I tried this, I was also logged into the webinar on my desktop and could easily see what was going on on the iPad. I might have to try this in my next webinar class.

iPad and computer screen
Presenting from Explain Everything on the iPad in a Google Hangouts Meet session.

Another media question I got today was about recording audio in a Canvas quiz. Yes, you can do that. Canvas is good at giving the ability to record audio and video either from within Canvas or uploading it from your computer. Most already know you can record audio and video in assignments and pages, but even I didn’t know about adding it to quiz questions. So when you’re setting up your quiz and you add a question, just click the “record/upload media” button on the menu bar. You can record right there in Canvas or you can upload a file recorded earlier on your computer. This is a good solution for a class that is learning pronunciation or a foreign language.

The rest of the questions I got today were about the extended delay for beginning face to face and hybrid courses. I think the messaging just confused everyone who worked their butts off to be ready for next week and now we have to delay. It’s really not fair to those who are teaching 8-week courses that were to start this week. Essentially they are not only moving the content online but now they have to teach it in 5 weeks. That’s crazy. We don’t even teach 5 week online courses in the summer in our department. My advice was to just start now if you’re ready. Students will do what you tell them if you help them. I have two hybrid courses that didn’t skip a beat. We are moving on as planned. They’re showing up to webinars, submitting work, and asking good questions. We’re going to get through this and finish on time.

Adjunct Faculty, Write6x6

The Professor and the Politician

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This is my third time doing a six-week blog for Write 6×6. In previous years, I focused on the prompt and sort of went spur of the moment with what I talked about with very little connection or theme between posts. I wanted to shake things up a bit this year. Over the next six weeks, I am going to take an in depth (or at least as in depth as six blog posts allow) look at the skills that teaching develops and how those skills can be useful in other arenas. Before I get into specifics, I need to provide a little context…

author and wife dancing at wedding
The happiest day of my life

Those who know me know that my life has undergone some significant events in the last half decade, starting with my marriage to my partner of (now) 17 years. In 2017, the first year I participated in Write 6×6, I was still in the process of adjusting to life in a new area and trying to get both my physical and emotional well-being on track. Life’s track is more like a roller-coaster and finding any sort of balance was near impossible, but through the ups and downs I began to find bits and pieces of a better version of myself.

Moving forward to 2018, I had become active in my local community by serving as a member, and eventual chair, of the Economic Advisory Board. That volunteer service forced me to expand my knowledge of web design, photography, videography, content creation, and marketing. The reason I say expand is because being an online instructor had already provided me with a base knowledge in most of those areas. My skills as an English instructor specifically became invaluable when I was placed on the Planning Commission. This may come as a shock (/sarcasm), but how laws and municipal code are worded can have a major impact on their effectiveness (and legality).

Snip of Municipal Code
Boring essay? Try legalese…

In Summer of 2018, the unexpected happened. One of our local council members had to retire for health concerns, and I was appointed to fill the vacancy. It was both exciting and horrifying at the same time. As a teacher, I have always striven to see the good and promote the best in those around me, and that effort was almost always reciprocated in kind. I discovered in my time as a volunteer the political arena had the potential to be a much uglier experience, even with the best of intentions.

Image of author and Mayor shaking hands after appointment.
The smile hides the fear of my appointment.

Without going into specifics, I will say that both my excitement and my fear have been justified on multiple occasions. Outside of the support of my amazing wife, the thing that has kept me from drowning in the stormy seas of politics has been the experience and skills I acquired over the last dozen years of teaching. Over the next few weeks I want to elaborate on those skills and why they are so important and underrepresented, and exactly the sort of skills communities need. I hope that maybe (just maybe) in the process I will encourage fellow instructors to get active in their communities as well.

Best case scenario: I succeed.

Worst case scenario: I educate.

It is a win-win.

 
Write6x6

Video Investigations as Assessment

Photo by Cheryl Colan

Sian (left) and Merry (right) at SCC Tech Talks 2017

On January 27, I attended TechTalks at SCC and watched Geology faculty Sian Proctor and Merry Wilson present their talk Video Investigations: Students Presenting Their Understanding of Our World. From their abstract (scroll down the linked page a bit to read it in full):

Video investigations are a unique way of having students demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of complex topics and establish accountability in an online learning environment.

I love this idea for assessment in an online class. Merry assigns 4 video investigations per semester, while Sian assigns them weekly. Their students:

  • receive specific guidelines for each assigned video investigation
  • see an example video made by the instructor
  • get a link to the free Screencast-O-Matic.com
  • do not need to be given instructions on how to make a screencast – they figure it out on their own
  • create 1- to 5-minute videos to show knowledge, demonstrate mastery or reflect on course topics
  • embed their videos into Canvas Discussions to share with the rest of their class

Photo of presentation slide on the Design of Video Investigations

Sian and Merry had some goals in mind when they designed the video investigation assignment. One goal was having a way to be sure the students were actually the ones submitting the work in an online environment. A video submission goes beyond plagiarism detection via Turnitin, because you are hearing the student’s own voice, and possibly even seeing the student via webcam. Another goal was to cut down on grading time. You can grade a 5-minute video in 5 to 10 minutes, depending on how much feedback you write per student. Other goals included increasing student engagement and learning retention.

Being top-notch scientists, Sian and Merry gathered data about their students before and after introducing video investigations into the courses they teach. If my memory is accurate, they found students tend to report they enjoyed the topics where video investigations were assigned more than the topics that did not involve a video investigation. Students also felt more of a sense of community, because they saw and heard each others’ faces and voices as they shared their videos. The process of creating video also built up the students’ information literacy skills over the course of the semester.

Photo of presentation slide on Engagement and Literacy

I’ve used video in the classroom as a student and as an adjunct, and I can confirm that having students produce short videos is an excellent learning and engagement tool. If you would like to learn more, reach out to Sian and Merry, or contact me in the Center for Teaching, Learning and Engagement for more information.