Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode 114 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Ken Bauer shares how to engage the heart and mind through the connected classroom.

Production Credit: [00:00:13] Produced by innovate learning maximizing human potential.

Production Credit: [00:00:22] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:51] Here’s a little behind the scenes secret that isn’t that interesting but but might become interesting and a little bit. Usually I record these intros all by myself but I actually already have today’s guest on the line with me. Ken welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Ken: [00:01:05] Thanks Bonni. Actually I I actually listened to the podcast. I’m just bumping my head along to music because I’m used to listening to that intro.

Bonni: [00:01:12] I love the music. It is one of the two. I’ve only actually received two criticisms of the podcast in the couple of years we’ve been doing it which I think is pretty good. But one of them a woman just did not like the music. Well it’s only 30 seconds. I think you can grin and bear it.

Ken: [00:01:29] I’ll disagree.

Bonni: [00:01:30] I love it too but I have that eclectic taste in music. The reason I wanted to have you on is of course I could read your bio and I’m very good at reading if you’ve been listening to the podcasts for a while you know. I excel at that skill. But yes indeed. I want to hear you tell this story. How did you wind up where you are where do you live where did you used to live and how did you get there.

Ken: [00:01:49] So I’m a Canadian I grew up in Victoria British Columbia born and pretty well raised all my life there. My father was a sailor so I spent a couple of week or a couple of years on the East Coast of Canada but all my life in Victoria undergrad at university Victoria Computing Science did my master’s at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Ken: [00:02:09] One of my undergrad professors that I really really loved and I modeled my teaching after him sent me there and I met a Mexican and so I ended up in Mexico and I’ve been teaching here most of the time since 1995 in this same institution that technological in Monterey. It’s hard to say that in English in the Guadalajara campus technically ends up open which is in the Guadalajara metropolitan area. And I went back to work as a software engineer for a year and a half and my students wanted me to come back and be what was the what we called the godfather of their graduating class or Padrino in Spanish and they invited me in 1998 in May in 1998 in December to be the godfather of their generation. And I just I decided I wanted to teach forever so I came back and that’s been my full time fulltime thing since January 1999 here on the campus.

Bonni: [00:03:05] One of the things that’s really resonated as I’ve gotten to know you a little bit over Twitter today. No actually it’s it’s kind of nice because I feel like I’ve seen your name a few times and then start started we were on a couple of sessions together. Did you tell me about your sense of love in teaching.

Ken: [00:03:24] So this came up along with Amy Collier’s presentation this morning actually and we had a session with her two days ago. And for me I’ve always been a teacher that I am not going to be there and I’m going like in a lecture. I want to really connect with my students. For me teaching isn’t about giving them the content of that.

Ken: [00:03:44] So yes one course the computing course of the software engineering course or whatever I just happen to be teaching this semester are really making a connection with my students and I want to I want to have those students come back and find me 10 20 and even longer years later and come back and thank me or ask for my advice. And so that’s really my job as an educator is not just preparing them and writing algorithms in computer science it’s preparing them for the world.

Ken: [00:04:13] And I don’t like the stereotypes of our software engineers don’t know how to communicate in the arts it’s people don’t get what the engineers do. I don’t like going with that stereotype but I really think it’s important for me to bring that level of richness to my classroom that my students know how to communicate with each other with me kind of ask questions in the Tec de Monterrey we call these the the transversal qualities that we try to teach to all of our students. We’re not a liberal arts college in that way. But even though we are focused on engineering business degrees we try to push that through the curriculum as opposed to just a special course in each one of these qualities. And so I really try to push that into my curriculum and for me that’s why spending time with my students is so important.

Bonni: [00:05:05] When I was in college it was my senior year and I had always thought I was going to be a high school teacher. That was from the youngest age I can remember too. And my dad’s business he was an agriculture and his business went under because down here in Southern California there was a drought in the late 80s early 90s and I could tell the story a little longer but I probably won’t do it justice. Let’s just say they were not paying for me to get that fifth year of college that was required to get my teaching credential.

Bonni: [00:05:36] And so I ended up working in business not understanding what it was but my perception was that good people go into teaching and become firefighters and bad people and I don’t think it was necessarily bad people. They just I didn’t see the heart that was in business and is in business today and so it’s fun to get to talk to someone like you who has such a big love for your students. I love for the subjects you teach and kind of that undercurrent of pulling that out of your students and showing them those connections if they are like me at the time who couldn’t necessarily see how their heart can come into the work that they do.

Ken: [00:06:13] Yeah. And I think it’s I think the stereotype comes in as well that we’re teaching technology and in a lot of people our junior tech year you don’t have heart or you have no soul where it that’s for the for the arts. And and I think that’s not true. I think we have a passion for teaching and we’d like to share that with our students.

Bonni: [00:06:32] Today we’re looking at something called the connected classroom. Before we even define what that is. Just describe one to me think of a great memory that you have of a connected classroom where you thought wow this is an incredible experience. And through that description I think we’ll find some of the definition of a connected classroom.

Ken: [00:06:51] Wow so there’s an activity that I always do with teachers. I asked them not to own or even anyone to identify the four people that they are. The way they are because of those four people whether it’s negative or positive experience that they’ve had in their lives. And I’ve got my list of four. I won’t go through all of them. And one of them the negative but one was was this teacher who sent me to the University of Washington. Bjorn Freeman-Benson and I get choked up talking about him because he was such a great teacher.

Ken: [00:07:19] And and I remember his classroom being that type of classroom where the students either really loved that instructor or they just didn’t like it at all. It was very polar and I loved it because it was much more where he gave us the voice of the classroom. We spent way more time talking about software engineering in particular object oriented programming because that was the course.

[00:07:45] And and he really listened to us and for me that was so important that I I felt that I had a voice with my peers. I think that’s where I really got a passion for teaching. I originally wanted to be a high school teacher as well but I remember the province of British Columbia extended the retirement age so I thought oh well crap I don’t have a job as a teacher now so I’ll I’ll do something else. But I think that class really showed me the model of the way I wanted to teach as as my career went forward and I keep looking back at Bjorn’s class and really appreciating the work that you did as a teacher.

Bonni: [00:08:21] What are some of the elements then of a connected classroom and what kind of made his classroom remind you connect to classrooms.

Ken: [00:08:31] I think it was and it was probably because it was more of an upper year course and it was the first chance here really got to do some real collaborative work and a group of four students. And then I can’t name any names but there was always the person who didn’t do as much work as the other ones and we learned a lot of skills of how to communicate how to collaborate. And this is the 19 early 1990s so it wasn’t like her working in her bunny slippers on the Internet together we had to actually physically go and sit in someone’s kitchen and work on code and pelo paper and diagrams and work as a collaborative team.

Ken: [00:09:07] For me. That was it was a new experience working in a team like that and having the teacher who was able to let go of control. That was something I really found that was really good in that classroom and they weren’t dominating the conversation. They were letting us run the show whether we were going to fail or not wasn’t so important. But he he really let us run the show.

Bonni: [00:09:32] And tell me about one of your connected classes and maybe how he’s inspired some aspects of it or maybe how even technology has afforded you to do some things that maybe he wasn’t even able to back then.

Ken: [00:09:44] So for me the kinetic crossing is really important because even though I have that luxury of having three hours a week I see my students and that’s really really important for me to get that face time and get to know my students. I find that the technology gives us the performances that I can I can share a really cool article I just saw and if I perhaps have a Facebook or for my class I can sit at lunch and I’m sharing this article and I notice that you know I have five likes and and a couple of comments on that post I share that isn’t the course material but it’s it’s tangential and relevant to what we’re seeing or to their degree program that they’re studying.

Ken: [00:10:26] And I can connect to my students online because I’ve got that cell phone in my hand and I happen to have it while I’m eating lunch with my colleagues and they’re they’re equally nerdy as me so they’re probably doing the same thing. So it’s ok. I don’t get I don’t get. Shut down by the lake saying drop your phone. So it’s really fun.

Bonni: [00:10:44] There are always these barriers that are up whether we intend them to be there or not. So just allowing your students to see some parts of your personality whether that be the music you listen to or the way he in fact the other day we were going back and forth on direct messages and you mentioned going to play Pokemon with your son.

Bonni: [00:11:03] And of course I instantly connect with it cause oh my husband plays just started playing that with our son too and I got to get out there and test it out myself. But it’s when you have that with another person you’ve just lowered that wall you’ve made yourself more accessible as a teacher and I think that when we have a heart for caring about our students it can sometimes be even harder to have the lenses to realize how scary we can still be. I mean we can we can have that heart and have it be a true desire of ours to connect but we have to just continually never let up with being intentional about the fact that there is this power dynamic of that.

Bonni: [00:11:44] Well I don’t know will it always be present. I think I have. I think for the foreseeable future it’s going to be present I think in my world.

Ken: [00:11:52] And I’ve actually got a good example of a good story about that I’ve got a video of a student Freida. She was an animation digital animation student she still is. I think she graduates this year and I usually ask my students to prepare a video or a blog post at the end of the year or the end of the semester to say what they liked what they didn’t like about the course not the content but the delivery method.

Ken: [00:12:16] And it’s more of a kind of a letter to those next year students to say here this is how to be successful in Ken Bauer’s class and some of them go with that route. But Freida talked about the fact that once she was embarrassed that she might need to see this video next semester she fails the course because she was right on the line. And so that was really embarrassing for her. She didn’t say in the video what she said in the e-mail and then she talked about the fact that the ability for me to not to not lecture my classroom because I flipped my classroom to spend more time one on one with my students. I sit beside them and I sit beside Frieda and we work on our code.

Ken: [00:12:53] I know that she struggles with when to use a for loop and stuff while loop and I also know what they do in their activities what type of sports they have or their brothers or sisters that might have been students with me and Frieda told me that she felt and this gets to my recommendation later that it was much easier for her to come to my office because she knew me we had this connection in a 17 18 year old girl going to some 40 something male professors office on the fourth floor of a building.

Ken: [00:13:24] There’s a tension there and then I can remember it as as an undergraduate I never went to my teacher’s offices until the fourth year and that’s when I actually got them meet meet Bjorn and spend lots of time with him in his office.

Ken: [00:13:36] But for me it showed that that connection that that ability to connect whether it’s music like you said or play music or the being in every class. And that’s really important my students that it broke down that barrier and she was able to come and see me in my office and ask me for help and not feel embarrassed about it or that she’s imposing or getting in the way or using my valuable time so that that’s really important for me that that that connection makes And I think the fact that we got to hang out in a session yesterday made today easier made me less nervous.

Bonni: [00:14:10] Me too. So tell me about what people typically struggle with when they maybe get inspired with the idea of doing a connected class letting go of this control having there be this more collaborative environment what are some of the things that they tend to struggle with in getting this approach to work the way they want it to.

Ken: [00:14:31] I think you said the key word is control. Bonni. It’s a lot of us are or maybe control freaks or maybe a better term for that but we like to have things lined up and we know what’s what’s going to happen with our students and we set up all the ducks in a row and check this off check this often and you get that activity done. And I think the fact that I have a connect a classroom where my students their homework assignments are blog posts and they do videos and I’m looking at some poetry that one student wrote I’m a for the last year for my class they get the ability to share their own personality in their posts and that’s great.

Ken: [00:15:12] They get to create blog posts with memes in it or funny pictures and images and they decorate their blogs that way they want to. And the way that the connect of course works is we have a feed WordPress mechanism that Alan Levine did an awesome job documenting You can check that out. I was sure the link is that all of their posts show up on my course site so there could be like some totally not safe for work. Image show up on my course website because some 18 year old adolescent male decided that was a cool image to put on their blog posts and it has sort of kind of happened.

Ken: [00:15:50] But I have to let go of control that I can’t control what content’s going to show up there and maybe not that maybe it’s just not a really good piece of work and it’s showing up on my core site which is under my cans courses dot com or whatever my my domain is and that can be scary for a lot of people it’s not scary for me at all because I’m I’m this weird rebel that I can get away with things down here in Mexico. But I I talk to faculty about innovation and maybe the number one difficulty for faculty in innovating in their practice is the fear of ridicule by their colleagues. The fear that the students don’t get it. And number one it really is the fear of their teaching evaluations.

Bonni: [00:16:35] Yeah that’s been a theme that’s come up so much on the show is just that. When we do these more collaborative types of things with our students not only is it giving up that control but it’s giving up the predictability for the students that in many cases they have grown to really enjoy. I guess when you spit out information I take that information in. And then in a few weeks I spit that information back out to you and that can become a really comfortable pattern it’s predictable I don’t have to be very challenged I don’t have to fail I don’t have to if I’m a reasonably OK student I don’t have to fail. And you know that’s that’s kind of what some of our students have just grown to appreciate that norms so sometimes if you start to experiment with these things you go whoa whoa wait they said this was a good thing. Ken says. His favorite teacher you know whatever whatever his real inspiration is that way. How come it doesn’t work for me.

Ken: [00:17:31] Right.

Bonni: [00:17:32] And it may be actually working for you because you’re actually challenging your students in a new way that’s uncomfortable but the other side is really cool.

Ken: [00:17:41] It’s a scary line. And one of my colleagues Nancy White that I did work with her last year uses that word confusiasm and I share that with you yesterday in Spanish it’s nice because it translates to confuse the Asmal but it’s that you’re on that edge. I’m confused but I’m really enthusiastic and that’s that’s where we learn a lot of things. And as a teacher that’s been doing a lot of this and I tend to change my classroom radically every January. I forget that I’ve been evolving what I’ve been doing over the last technically 21 years but consciously over the last six years changing the way I work with my students and they want to kind of.

Ken: [00:18:21] And they when I say the other teachers see what I do and they’re scared that this can’t work for me and my answer is you just got to take baby steps and change those things you can change and drive it in your direction. You’re not going to be can Bauers class you’re going to be you you’re going to be Bonni’s class and you’re going to have Bonni’s students and they’re different students than mine and just let go experiment and find out what works for you.

Bonni: [00:18:48] I’m glad you mentioned baby steps and I want to just kind of talk a little bit about what the full full force connected classroom looks like and then let’s go small teaching to take credit James Lang let’s do let’s back it up after we paint that vision too.

Ken: [00:19:05] Sure.

Bonni: [00:19:05] Just a way to get started. So let’s start with the real. Full board connected classroom we have students who are blogging maybe there including video or poetry or photography. All different kinds of media in their own individual blogs. And if it’s full force connected then we’re talking about things that the public can see right anyone on the internet can see it it’s not behind any kind of a password.

Ken: [00:19:32] And comment on it and or not. And a lot of people get upset or scared because they’re going to expose their students on the Internet and they can publish as Batman 23 if they want to they don’t have to put their face there. They don’t have to put their real name there.

Ken: [00:19:48] And we do talk about this this opens up some wonderful conversations about digital identity with my students. That’s a whole different that’s a whole different story. So they do share although their blog post sometimes it gets large because some of my students I used to have a hundred students in this one course with a couple sections or three sections and they’re all set. They’re all syndicating to this one mother blog. My my courseware where my syllabus is. And all of their syndicated content.

Ken: [00:20:14] I’m setting up this semester blogs and I’m looking back at last semester course. And there’s the 1968 blog posts there from my students. Which is pretty darn massive Really. To be honest I didn’t read all of them and my students know that and they understand that I don’t have time to read every single one of their creations and they’re actually fine with that because I try to teach them that’s more about your reflection on your learning that’s really important there. So yeah it’s massive.

Bonni: [00:20:44] That was one of the things that Michelle Miller spoke about Michelle Miller is the author of minds online and I’ll put a link to the show that she was on if anyone wants to go back and listen to that one. But one of the things she spoke about when she was a guest was this whole idea of even in her classes having quizzes that you didn’t necessarily grade each and every single answer and that still today even though I talked to her such a while back I still my mind is going wait a minute wait a minute you’re not doing your job if you don’t you know every single thing is a challenge to me. And then it and then it kind of made me think well there’s really something to this.

Bonni: [00:21:21] And I kind of have been the same way with blogs because I work so much with people who haven’t blogged before and a lot of times with people who just didn’t grow up accustomed to sharing every meal in a photo of every every carefully constructed Pinterest worthy meal online. This is a terribly uncomfortable thing for them so I have always felt as the educator well because they are working so hard and taking so many personal risks I better do them the service of reading everything but I have to let go of that a little bit and you’ve really inspired me.

Ken: [00:21:54] I felt that way way Bonni at the start of doing this before the blogging I have my students do a lot of YouTube videos showing their mastery content of different topics. And and it just killed me I summed up the number of hours of YouTube video I had to watch my students and I did watch all of them that first semester and I just couldn’t do it any more.

Ken: [00:22:14] I didn’t I’m asking them to do three minute videos and they make 27 minute epic YouTube videos that I’m still watching at 1.5 times speed I can’t slog through all that content and they get to know that and that’s fine.

Bonni: [00:22:28] That’s a whole different paradigm that you don’t have to view every single work product but to create that energy and that excitement around them seeing each other’s creations and even extending that well beyond your class and that actually was the other thing I was going to mention as we described the full force connected classroom. Right. You’re actually leveraging every every possibility we would also be thinking about.

Ken: [00:22:52] Sharing my twitter. They get exposed to the public. My former students I don’t like using the word ex-student because that’s a final term. My students from the past come and comment on their posts so they answer questions on Twitter that my students have about about the course content or even people that weren’t my students just random followers on the Internet or are injecting themselves and saying hi. Like Laura Gogia did the other day for my students. And one of the classes so they’re getting exposed to the live Internet. They’re getting authentic audience. We like to think they’re going to have better quality product because they’re not they’re not delivering for one they’re delivering for forever one. And their stuff lives on.

Ken: [00:23:35] I have a part of the connected course is when you set it up you’re going to want to lock it down at the end of the course so that their stuff doesn’t disappear that you keep copies of everything because because I’m that way I like to keep copies of everything but my students blogs are still there and they don’t make them go away.

Ken: [00:23:53] I’m looking at Fernando’s right here in front of me I brought up the original so I could see her her portable pictures looks like and everything else in the context the way she wrote it not the way it comes into my sight. They’re still there. They still keep blogging in the end. And my students have taken this idea that they were blogging for my course and then they do it for different courses or they do it for their school club or their church group or whatever they’re involved in. They bring it to another domain.

Bonni: [00:24:21] So mediums come up a little bit in our slack channel and Robert Talbert was trying to have us not think of it as a blogging platform. And maybe a little bit more as a community than we might think of as a normal blogging platform but I apologize Robert I’m going to call it a black friday.

Ken: [00:24:41] I think it was yesterday asking us to come up with with a generic name for these type of platforms so yeah a little bit of a conversation.

Bonni: [00:24:47] Maybe a publishing platform might be closer because like Linked In now people can go publish their own things within Linked In. And so this what I’ve heard about medium is that it’s far easier for someone to get started. And then also to have students easier to follow students and have students follow you in and create the sense of a mother blog without actually having the technical expertise I have gone back and forth in the past because I like you I teach a lot of business students.

Bonni: [00:25:16] And part of what we should be doing is helping to prepare them for their careers and wordpress is just so prominent. Still now that I kind of feel like if we can just take that that little extra bit past a proprietary tool like medium. Right you can still use medium if you know how to use WordPress but it just introduces a lot of really important concepts like what’s a page and what’s a post and how are those things different in that kind of thing. So I go back and forth but I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that it might be a good getting started.

Ken: [00:25:47] The struggle between Light weight and easy to use. And also you know just leaving some power tools in their hand and seeing what’s going to go on and we’re also getting back Bonnie to the question of how we like to kind of control the way they’re going to do it as opposed to letting them go free. I didn’t let my students set up any platform they want as long as it produces an RSS feed that I can chew on and put into my my mother ship blog so my students have used.

Ken: [00:26:13] I think they use Weebly no MySpace lately but with known as a great platform it’s an open source platform that I really like their platform or WordPress or blogger anything that will spit out RSS I can take and massage it into into the mother ship Block.

Bonni: [00:26:29] And we’ve talked about RSS but just give a quick definition for anyone who is a new listener.

Ken: [00:26:34] RSS is Real Simple Syndication so what it is is kind of a summary of the posts that are on the blog. I’m really simplifying here to let a machine know what’s there. So what happens is the mothership blog knocks on the students blog and say hey is there any new material. And if there is let me know and they may communicate in a very light manner that the it only says Oh we’ve got these posts here’s the title Here’s the author here’s a first paragraph and then the mothership blog and go oh great. Let me pull in the rest of those content so it’s a way for computers to talk to other computers. Totally oversimplifying and someone will slaughter me for that one but that’s ok.

Bonni: [00:27:15] I think we should be simple on these. In fact we’ll link to a great video by…

Ken: [00:27:20] RSS is the glue that keeps the Internet held together in many ways.

Bonni: [00:27:23] And makes it so personal to us. I can read your blog and go wow. Not only did he have amazing things to say today but I bet you he’s going to have amazing things to say next week and I don’t want to miss that just because I’m not on Twitter when you happen to tweet post.

Ken: [00:27:37] And subscribe. There’s all sorts of fun stuff.

Bonni: [00:27:39] Yeah yeah. So that’s wonderful and I appreciate that you’ve just helped shape in my mind a little bit of why not use any blogging tool you want to and I can still say WordPress is a good skill to have but.

Ken: [00:27:53] I have WordPress and I always recommend WordPress. and use what you want to use as long as I can massage it into my workflow.

Bonni: [00:28:00] And I think especially for me that’s helpful because unless the class is called an introduction to WordPress. Why. Why do I need to push that necessarily. So that’s what’s really helpful.

Bonni: [00:28:11] Well this is actually the point in this show where we each get to give some recommendations and I’m excited to share mine. I think it might sound a little cold at first because it’s all about making our work a little faster when it comes to writing things and writing to people. It’s called TextExpander and I actually had to go back because I’m compulsive about not recommending the same thing for me or that you know more than once and it was actually recommended by my husband Dave all the way back on Episode 8 but I’m going to recommend it from me this time and it is a tool called TextExpander.

Bonni: [00:28:45] And many of us know about auto correct ware on our phones if we mistype something or we’re starting to type a word and it figures out what we actually want to type that it’ll actually fill the whole word in. Or if you’re me and you’re talking to Ken Bain and you type the Minerva prize it’ll type the manure prize so we get ourselves into some trouble sometimes. But those built in tools to our phones text messaging and those built in tools to our computers can really go a long way in terms of features and what text expander can do is where I just type in a couple of keystrokes.

Bonni: [00:29:22] And it can put out whatever text I have put in there. A classic example for me is I can never remember my work phone number because I don’t ever answer my phone I’m never sitting at my desk it’s my cell phone that’s the one I actually answer. But I do need to put my work number in a number of times.

Bonni: [00:29:37] I have a text expander snippet that I type in the letters Z and then VU phone I think is what I type and all of a sudden there’s the phone number I don’t have to remember it but I can also type in something like. For now for the show notes for all of the podcast episodes I type in a few keystrokes and all of a sudden the whole entire template comes in and I can feel I can actually put fill-ins. And so for today’s episode it said you know who’s your guest. Ken Bauer and what’s the topic you’re talking about what’s the title of the episode. What’s the episode number and it puts all of those variables into my text.

Bonni: [00:30:16] And the reason I said it might seem cold is that I’m using this a lot because there are campus’s rolling over to a new learning management system in the fall and I’m getting a lot of the same questions and it might seem like wow that’s really like you’re some robot or something did you take that. It allows me to do all I can customize the messages and say I hope that your daughter’s doing OK. I know she has been ill or whatever but it allows me to free up that much more time for the meaningful things that don’t involve answering a step by step help desk type of question.

Ken: [00:30:50] And you won’t forget to include a piece that you should have in there.

Bonni: [00:30:53] Exactly. So I’m a big fan of TextExpander and I was going to go look up what the Windows equivalent is actually I remember there’s one called Breevy. There’s a number of these text expansion types of tools but I saw that they have a beta out on Windows too so people could check out the text expander windows and see if that version works but there’s a lot of different tools that do the same sort of thing. So tell us Ken what are your recommendations for today.

Ken: [00:31:17] Well that’s basically programming and we could tell the kids about the old days when we had keyboard overlays on our keyboards. But now that’s a whole different story.

Ken: [00:31:24] So I was going to recommend two things quickly if you’re interested in connected courses contact me and I’m sure Bonni I have the contacts there. But Alan Levine publishes lots and he has a series of five blog posts I believe called Building Connected Courses Feed WordPress 101.

Ken: [00:31:44] And so if you go to Alan’s blog he has this amazing detail of how this set up your own feet. WordPress if you’re so inclined to set that up and I followed it exactly and giving some feedback to improve it. So that’s one recommendation. Or find your local nerd that will help you set it up. I’ve set it up for other people.

Ken: [00:32:04] The other two I was going to recommend today is using YouCanBook.Me system which ties into my Google calendar. And I like doing office hours where I sit here and wait for students to show up. Like the students to be able to reserve a 15 minute block or a half hour block with me and they can do that online. They get an immediate email which lets them know it goes into my Google calendar so that I know I have to be in my office at that hour so that my student will know that I’m there for them.

Ken: [00:32:35] And it really it makes it easier for me to know where I am. The students get more of a commitment that they make a commitment to come and see me and I like it because I actually see my students more now as opposed to sitting in an office in a static time that doesn’t work for everyone because they have sports or whatever else so I leave my whole day open. And then they can block time with me and during the week and that’s made a lot more connection for my students and I like it and we use it for other stuff like booking conference rooms and stuff on campus.

Bonni: [00:33:05] The toold that I’ve been using for a couple of years now. It’s called Time Trade. And a friend of mine recently told me about YouCanBook.Me and she is one of those super geeky friends who when she tells you something you know you’re going to be the best of whatever it is out there.

Bonni: [00:33:20] And one of the things I really was impressed about you can book me is just that you can provide other information in that same context. For example if a student was setting up office hours with you would there be any information you would want to tell them. Should they bring something. Should they come early. Should they let you know if they’re not going to be able to make it on time and whatever the the kinds of information and the service I use is just not quite as flexible in terms of that other information in context. And as you said it’s got other features too like booking conference rooms and you can get really really fancy with that. Are you using the free version or are you using the free version.

Ken: [00:33:56] It does. It does enough. I actually I should throw some money out. I’m kind of the person who likes to learn to throw money at different projects that I think are really valid producing good software. It’s also a good message for my students to to support the work of others. I do support a lot of other practices just money as well. It lets me customize it to do. I found that I needed to tell my students please tell me why you’re coming to see me so I can do a little bit of prep before you show up as opposed to just I know you’re going to be here at 115 for 15 minutes and I have no idea why.

Bonni: [00:34:26] A lot of these tools at least the earlier versions of them you had to leave your calendar wide open would be like as if you were available 24 hours a day Monday through Friday. And with these now the way they work is you can just have you know a two hour block on a Monday. That’s open. But if you schedule a doctor’s appointment on your personal calendar in the middle of those two hours it’s not going a list that as available back on you down here.

Bonni: [00:34:51] It automatically picks up from my Google and doesn’t let them schedule something they already have scheduled. But I learned that tip is make sure you block out extra time before you need to run to be to your next class. So I’ve had students book at 15 minutes right before my class. But then they’re here and I’ve got like 10 seconds to run to my classroom.

Bonni: [00:35:09] Yeah you definitely have to think about those margins in our lives for sure.

Ken: [00:35:13] Mm hmm.

Bonni: [00:35:13] Well Ken thank you so much for being on the show. I hope it’s just the first of many conversations since I don’t think we’re done yet.

Ken: [00:35:20] No.

Bonni: [00:35:20] I think we’ve just begun.

Ken: [00:35:22] We’ve opened the box.

Bonni: [00:35:23] Yes. I really appreciate your time and it’s just the way that you generously give up your knowledge to others.

Ken: [00:35:29] Well thank you Bonni. It’s been great. And I look forward to much more collaboration going forward.

Bonni: [00:35:36] It was so great having Ken on the show this week and one of the things he told me before we started recording is that he listens to the show all the way through to the end.

Bonni: [00:35:44] So today’s outro is dedicated to Ken who I know is still listening. If you would like to subscribe to the weekly updates what you get in that weekly update is a single email from me with the show notes to all the great stuff that Ken and I talked about all those links in there so you don’t have to remember to go to the episode to find that information. And also an article about productivity from me. You can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. And when you do you’ll get the newly redesigned ed tech essentials guide with 19 tools to help you use technology and your teaching and productivity. You can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Bonni: [00:36:26] Thanks so much for listening and thanks for all the encouragement on the newly redesigned Website it’s been fun to see a lot of people come up there we are now paying more for our web host but it’s worth it to have more of you as a part of the community. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.