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An Essential Time Saver

By Bonni Stachowiak | August 4, 2018 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

TextExpander: An Essential Time Saver
TextExpander: An Essential Time Saver

If you have been listening to the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast over the last few months, you have heard me talk about TextExpander (available both on the Mac and Windows). This application is one of the first programs I ever install on a new computer because it is so essential to me getting work done.

However, talking to you about TextExpander isn’t quite as powerful as getting to show it in action. That’s what I’ll do in this post. I have created three, short demos that let you peek behind the curtain to see how I use TextExpander.

You Can Still Keep a Personal Touch

Before I get to that, however, I did want to mention that my goal in saving time with TextExpander isn’t to lose the personal touch that comes from authentically-written prose. Instead, my approach is to consider that whatever time I can save through the automation that TextExpander affords me means that either I can give that much more of a personal approach as I customize boilerplate text, or that I have additional time to be able to reply to more people.

When someone comes on the podcast as a guest, I do use TextExpander to help me curate a message of gratitude to the person. There are a few basic pieces of information I always send:

  • A link to the episode’s show notes
  • Information about where the podcast is distributed (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, etc.)
  • A link to the quote graphics from the episode

By automating that part of the email, I can spend more time letting them know the kind of response I have been getting about their episode on social media or some of my own personal reflections about our conversation.

When someone gets in touch with me asking about how to join the Teaching in Higher Ed Slack group, by having a “canned” response, I am able to get back to more people who have questions or suggestions.

TextExpander screen
View demonstrations of TextExpander in action below

Demos

Below are three demos that show TextExpander in action.

Demo: Part 1

In this demo, I show TextExpander in action as I create new show notes for an episode. The example I show uses fill-in snippets, where I can customize the text before it gets entered. TextExpander has a video showing how easy fill-in snippets are to create.

Demo: Part 2

In this demo, I give even more examples of TextExpander in action.

Demo: Part 3

In this final demo, I show how to add new snippets to TextExpander and how easy it is to make it work for you.

Purchase TextExpander

Get 20% off your first year of TextExpander and a 30 day free trial (select Teaching in Higher Ed from the dropdown menu os where did you hear about TextExpander?)

Other TextExpander Resources

I’ve only skimmed the surface here, as there are so many ways that TextExpander can save us time and improve our workflows. The more I learn about TextExpander, the more time it saves me (and lets me know with periodic reports on my TextExpander stats).

TextExpander statistics
My monthly TextExpander statistics

Below are some links to articles that extend the benefits of TextExpander in higher education.

  • An Introduction to Text Expansion, by Hanna Peacock on Inside Higher Ed
  • TextExpander video: Introduction to TextExpander
  • TextExpander video: TextExpander on Windows
  • Download existing collections of TextExpander snippets
  • TextExpander video: Sharing snippets
  • Jason Jones shares his uses of TextExpander on The Chronicle’s ProfHacker
  • Using Text Expansion Software in Your Workflow by Jason Heppler on Inside Higher Ed
  • Ryan Cordell shares his uses of TextExpander on The Chronicles ProfHacker
  • I share about TextExpander and other tools that contribute to Frictionless Systems
  • The Sweet Setup shares TextExpander as one of the “Apps We Love”

This post is a sponsored post. I am grateful to TextExpander for helping to support the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. However, I have been sharing about the benefits of using TextExpander on the podcast and in the blog long before they provided any financial support.

Filed Under: Productivity

Five Finds

By Bonni Stachowiak | July 31, 2018 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

The Stachowiak Family in Keystone

I was able to attend the Instructure Conference (#instcon) in Keystone, Colorado this past week. While I learned a lot about Canvas, specifically, I am going to keep this post focused on things not directly associated with it. I know not all of the Teaching in Higher Ed community uses Canvas, so I’ll keep this fairly broad.

Tools and Hacking from Digital Pedagogy Lab 2018

While I can’t be there in person at this year’s Digital Pedagogy Lab (DPL), it sure is fun to witness some of the learning from the sidelines. They are curating some Tools and Hacking as a DPL learning community.

How to Prepare for Class Without Over-preparing in The Chronicle

Another terrific article from James Lang in The Chronicle. Jim knows how to make our greatest challenges seem more palatable. From his ubiquitous book, Small Teaching, to this article in The Chronicle on how to not over-prepare for our classes.

Scene on Radio Podcast: Seeing White Season

Thanks to Bryan Dewsbury on episode 215, I discovered the Seeing White season of Yale’s Scene on Radio Podcast. From the Scene on Radio website: “Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?” In addition to the great podcast episodes, there’s a study guide and an extensive bibliography.

Hipster Ibsum

Some of you may have heard of Lorem Ipsum, which is the “dummy” placeholder text that people use when designing something to see how generic text looks. You can generate some Lorem Ipsum of your very own.

At Instructure Conference, I was introduced to Hipster Ipsum. It is just like Lorem Ipsum, only way hipper. I kind of want to design something using Hipster Ipsum, just to get me some chuckles.

Make Time for Work That Matters in Harvard Business Review

Some great ideas for how to carve out more time to do things that really matter from Julian Birkinshaw. Dave (my spouse and best friend) and I have been working diligently to think about what we just aren’t going to do, anymore. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but this is one of the things we outsource about half of the “load” on these days.

Your Turn

What’s been one of your finds lately?

Filed Under: Resources

In Case You Missed It

By Bonni Stachowiak | July 20, 2018 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

Looking at the Teaching in Higher Ed website analytics recently got easier for me for some reasons I won’t write much about here, lest I bore you. Since I can look at the data without as much friction, I check it more often and am often surprised by which posts from both long ago and recently got the most traction from readers.

Below are the posts that you may have missed that were particularly popular with Teaching in Higher Ed blog readers (in order):

  1. Heads Up Game is a Lively EdTech Tool – it still continues to be the case, four years later. And is the most accessed blog post I have ever written. If only I had known that would be the case, in advance, I would have taken more time with it.
  2. Active Learning Resources – A colleague is trying to build more of a culture of active learning so I curated some resources for her from the Teaching in Higher Ed site. Anyone interested in pursuing this aim should also read Josh Eyler’s post: Active Learning Has Become a Buzzword (and Why That Matters)
  3. How to Make a Seemingly Boring Topic Come Alive – Like the post I wrote on the Heads Up Game (#1), this 2014 post keeps coming up at the top of the analytics. If only the marshmallow study had held up as well. Sigh.
  4. How to Respond When Students Give Wrong Answers – I have regularly been told I do this well. I’ll take it, since there are so many other aspects of my teaching that I’m continually hard on myself about.
  5. Ways to Use Screencasting in Your Teaching – It has been fun to see the posts about creating content get some traction. We need to continually be working on doing this better.
  6. Surprises in the Classroom – This one sat on my blog post ideas for a long, long while. We don’t all have to be extroverted in our teaching or feel the pressure to be entertainers. However, regularly seeking ways to ignite curiosity in ourselves and our students is a vital practice, from my perspective.
  7. Listener Question: Essential Reading on Pedagogy – It is hard for me to ever write lists, for fear of all that I will leave out. But, this was my best attempt at the time to capture books that have transformed my teaching.
  8. Digital Reading – I continue to become more and more of a digital reader and have such a hard time ever committing the time to reading a physical copy of a book. This post outlines why that is…
  9. How to Create a Pencast – I haven’t been creating quite as many pencasts these days, but when I do – my workflow is still the same as what is described in this post and video.
  10. How to Create a Video for a Class – Speaking of videos, this post with advice on how to create these elements for our students attempted to break the process down into practical steps.

The most popular pages on the site, as a whole, continue to be:

  • Episodes – the searchable, browsable list of all the past podcast episodes
  • About – a newly redesigned about page with my bio, info about the podcast and my speaking, FAQs, and pictures.
  • Blog – The browsable blog page with all the posts I have ever written for Teaching in Higher Ed.
  • Recommendations – a recent website redesign has us working on pulling out all the recommendations that have ever been made at the end of each episode into a browsable list with categories such as music, books, ideas, and technology. We aren’t finished yet, but what is there does make for some good inspiration.

recommended books screenshot

I'm honored to get to be part of your professional development through the Teaching in Higher Ed community. I trust this post has given you an opportunity to catch up on some of the blog posts and web pages you may have missed.

Filed Under: Resources

Top Tools 2018

By Bonni Stachowiak | July 13, 2018 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

My votes on Jane Hart's Top Tools for Learning

Each year, Jane Hart compiles her Top Tools for Learning. You’re invited to participate in the voting either by filling out a form, blogging about your choices or sharing via Twitter.

My votes are not in order of priority, though most people who write about this topic do a ranked list. Recently, Jane Hart started having us categorize how we use the tools:

  • For our own personal and professional learning
  • In the workplace
  • In education

I will include how I use each tool, along with each vote. Also, I will share those tools that have been on my list for many years at this point.

Twitter (personal/professional learning)

This social network has been on my list for four years now. I’m able to connect with people who are (as Peter Newbury recommended on episode #53) “like me and who are not like me.” Twitter is a microblogging service, which means people share short thoughts and interact with each other by replying to others’ messages. For something that won’t fit as a short message a lot of people link to other resources on the internet, like articles, videos, or websites.

2018 Podcast Greats

Overcast (personal/professional learning)

This is the best iOS app I have found for listening to podcasts (which have been on my list for all four years now. I can subscribe to podcasts and have them all come into one app for me to listen to them when I’m ready. I listen to podcasts at double speed and Overcast takes care of removing silence. More learning in less time… My 2018 Podcast Greats post gives an idea of what I am listening to these days.

Feedly (personal/professional learning)

I was thinking about how much I dislike Apple News the other day. The reason why is directly related to why Feedly is on my top ten list. With a service like Apple News, you get what they generally think you might like, based on some not very intelligent algorithms. Using an RSS reader like Feedly, you pick exactly what websites you want to “feed” into your news feed and don’t have to rely on what technology thinks you may like. I’m seriously considering switching to Inoreader, which Laura Gibbs regularly shares ab out how to get it to integrate with the LMS my institution uses: Canvas.

Unread (personal/professional learning)

Think of Feedly as working behind the scenes to pull together all the stuff I might want to read into one place and to mark things as read, once I have either decided I don’t want to check them out, or once I have read them. Feedly also has a website and apps that can be used for actually consuming the content. However, my absolute favorite tool to use for reading my Feedly content is Unread (on the iPad). I do most of my RSS reading in bed. Unread allows me to easily mark a bunch of articles as read without having to move my hand around the screen hardly at all. It is hard to explain until you try it, but they definitely live up to their claim that, “Reading should not feel like work.”

WordPress (personal/professional learning)

I had the opportunity to interview Harold Jarche for the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast recently (episode 213). It was like talking to one of my learning heroes. He’s an expert in personal knowledge mastery and emphasizes the value of “working out loud.” As I blog, I am sense-making. WordPress is the most widely used blogging tool in the world and it helps me both make sense of what I am learning and share it with anyone who visits my website. There’s a free version of WordPress that lets people get started with it. Those who want to extend its use a self-hosted WordPress site, which allows for greater customization. Reclaim Hosting is a company that offers self-hosted WordPress sites (among other things) for primarily an educational audience. Their website explains that they help people: “Take control of your digital identify. Reclaim Hosting provides educators and institutions with an easy way to offer their students domains and web hosting that they own and control.”

Poll Everywhere (education)

This polling system has been on my list for all four years now and shows no sign of stopping. I am a big fan of using retrieval practice in my teaching to help students retain more and achieve deeper learning in my classes. Poll Everywhere helps me do that and encourage students to pull their phones out, instead of telling them to put them away. I can use Poll Everywhere within PowerPoint on my Mac and never have to leave PowerPoint when I am using it. On the other end of the spectrum, I can use Poll Everywhere on my iPad and never involve a computer or projector at all.

Quizlet (education)

I mentioned making use of retrieval practice in much of my teaching when describing why I use PollEverywhere. That tool is used more in my teaching, but when I want to encourage students to take the learning with them, I highly recommend Quizlet. Flash cards have been shown to be great study tools. They are a form of retrieval practice. Quizlet takes flashcards to the digital world. I can create flashcards in Quizlet and share them with my students, or they can create them and share them with the rest of the class. In the classroom, I love using their Quizlet Live game. I’ve written about this experience on my blog and also Sierra Smith talked about how it helped her get to know other students in a class in a more authentic way on episode 199.

Glisser (workplace)

I use Glisser almost exclusively in my keynote speaking and workshops these days. Glisser is an audience response system. It lets me: Present my slides on the web (so I don’t have to worry about whether or not a computer is going to have the font I need or my slides might be formatted differently when I present them on someone else’s computer), poll an audience, share videos during a presentation, have people ask questions while I’m presenting and queue them up when I’m ready to address them, and even let people tweet out my slides as I’m presenting them.

Kindle app (personal/professional learning)

I enjoy reading on my iPad via the Kindle app and have documented my reasons for doing digital with my reading in the past. Being able to save my highlights and have them in one place well after finishing a book is wonderful. I also appreciate the integration with Goodreads, so I can keep track of what I have read and connect with friends who also use the service and provide good recommendations for what other books I might want to check out.

Zoom (education)

I have been using web conferencing systems of one kind oranother for decades. Sadly, they have mostly become bloated systems that make it difficult to share with an audience, but easy to bore that audience to tears. Zoom is different. If I want to share something. Anything. A slide deck, a video, an application, a picture, even my entire computer screen… I can do that in just a couple of clicks. It is seamless. That’s nice. What’s even nicer is that any person who is with me on Zoom may also do the same (unless I have a need to restrict that capability for some reason – I usually don’t, but there are certainly instances like with larger groups of people coming together where it does make sense to turn that setting off). Doug McKee has written about how he uses Zoom with Duet Display and PDF Expert in his econometrics classes. That actually represents another thing I love about Zoom. You can use just a few of its features and get started simply. But there’s a lot of additional features you can make use of to make it do some amazing things. I really enjoyed Andy Traub’s Master Zoom class which made me see more of what is possible using Zoom.

Past Top Ten Tools for Learning Votes

Here are my Top Tools for Learning blog posts from recent years:

  • Top Tools 2017
  • Top Tools 2016
  • Top Tools 2015

This year, I was inspired by Harold Jarche’s Top Ten Tools for Learning post to create a graphic of my year-by-year votes.

Here are a few items of note I found when looking through the lists:

  • I am still a huge fan of Canvas LMS, even though it didn’t make it on to this year’s list. There have been a lot of conversations going on about teaching outside the LMS. Yet, there are also reasons whey remaining inside the “walls” of an LMS are preferred. I have never seen an LMS as mobile-friendly, easy to use, and then easy to grow with as you learn more as Canvas LMS. They also have a wonderful community online that contributes to my learning about Canvas on a weekly basis.
  • I’m surprised Pinboard didn’t make it on my list this time, since I use it daily. It is still the best bookmarking tool I have used and integrates well with Unread, which did make it on the list this year.
  • I also still use SnagIt on a daily basis. Probably on an hourly basis, anytime I’m sitting in front of my computer. I think I probably think of it less as a learning tool than maybe I used to, but it is integral to all the kinds of work I do and I’m grateful for its continued improvement year after year for decades now.
  • Clarify sadly went out of business. I haven’t found anything affordable that is anything remotely as good as it was. Planbook (Helmansoft) also stopped being supported / actively developed and I haven’t found anything remotely as good, especially given that I can do most of my class planning within Canvas.
  • iTunes podcasts is now called Apple Podcasts. There’s a free app that comes on iOS devices called Podcasts that is a good place to get started with podcasts, but I still find Overcast to be superior. Google recently announced their new app: Google Podcasts for Android devices that looks like it is worth a look.
  • I left my LiveScribe smartpens back in 2015. I do all my pencasting now using an Apple Pencil and my iPad Pro.
  • Attendance 2 is still going strong and is my preferred method for taking attendance. However, other tools pushed it down a bit to have it make the top ten tools specifically for learning.
  • I chuckled a bit at my mentions of Plickers and GoAnimate, as they really turned out to be more aspirational than ones I actually used on a regular basis.

Your Turn

Consider voting on Jane Hart’s 2018 Top Ten Tools, or commenting below if there’s a tool you think should have been on my list that I may want to know about.

Filed Under: Resources

Igniting Curiosity and Imagination

By Bonni Stachowiak | July 5, 2018 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Our kids have started their summer camp routine. They won’t wind up going every week, but there will be times when I can tackle those things that are hard to keep up with during the academic year.

They did such a wonderful job of making the transition that I wanted to reward them. I shared a number of possibilities of what we might do to celebrate. They picked the place I least wanted to go – but such are the chances we take when we let them decide.

That’s how I found myself at Chuck E Cheese earlier this week.

How I found myself bawling at Chuck E Cheese involves Sean Michael Morris’ keynotes at the University of Warwick:

Imagination as a Precision Tool for Change

Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash

Sean writes about agency in such a powerful way. I know that my understanding of it is childlike and immature. He writes about how some of us might think we are giving our kids agency when we get them a car for their 18th birthday. He shares:

“The car is a symbol of freedom without being freedom. In offering that car, a parent also offers with it an indoctrination into the world of car insurance and car payments, into the world of traffic violations. Cars are not themselves free from policing, and therefore neither will the teenager driving one be.”

I wonder how many times in my feeble attempts to give my students agency in my teaching, I have actually given them a car. I’m also pretty sure that give is the wrong verb to use when talking about agency. Is it something I can give to someone else?

When I teach doctoral students, they can resist taking risks and experimenting far more than my undergraduate students ever do. I make clumsy attempts at fostering an environment that might facilitate greater agency, while they ask for more specifics on assignments and where they might find the rubrics. Sometimes I get hopeful when learning from people like Sean, while other times the existing system and culture feels too massive for me to ever hope to have any impact on (particularly as an adjunct, which I am in the case of teaching doctoral students).

As I sat in Chuck E Cheese, I was being hammered by cognitive dissonance. I subscribe so wholeheartedly to what Sean was advocating in his talk, yet I felt so incapable of breaking free of the oppressive systems my work is often embedded within. He talked about how we get tempted to perform “what Freire might call an adaptation, a shift in behavior designed not to alter the status quo, but to maintain it, even within a slightly altered framework.” I suspect I regularly do this, sometimes being aware of my failed attempts, while other times thinking I “succeeded.”

I managed to get myself together after a rather unexpected event took place within the walls of Chuck E Cheese. If you have been there, you know that every hour or so, this giant mouse (well, it is a person in a mouse costume, but you’re probably with me still) comes out and parades around the restaurant. All the kids follow the character as if he were the pied piper until they all get to the front of the restaurant.

This parade was like none other I have ever seen at Chuck E Cheese. About 20% of the kids were under five years old and the other 80% appeared to be at least high school age. A basketball team was celebrating one of their players’ birthdays and they seemed to be enjoying themselves as much as the younger kids were.

I was expecting them to show that they were attempting to be ironic. Instead, their smiles seemed genuine and this sense of pure joy continued as they began to dance. The mouse led everyone in the movements and every person joined in without reluctance. The young men modified the moves only somewhat to better let them express their more advanced dance abilities. I even found myself grooving a bit, never having recognized that the Chuck E Cheese theme song was so danceable.

When I sat down, my tears were completely dry and I was back to celebrating with the kids as they brought over fists full of tickets and a raw sense of delight. When they ran off to play other games, I would go back to Twitter, this time with a renewed hope that no, I can’t do this, but we just might be able to do it together.

When we got home, I had our son watch one of the Playing for Change songs: Stand by Me. If you’re not familiar with them, they create songs using musicians from all over the world. They combine the audio tracks that were recorded with gifted artists from Indonesia, France, Japan, Brazil, Morocco, India, England, the United States, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Australia, and beyond.

The first musician starts out reminding us:

“No matter who you are. No matter where you go in your life. At some point, you’re going to need somebody to stand by you…”

Stand by Me | Playing for Change | Song Around the World

I’m thankful for people like Sean Michael Morris for pushing us to be better at what we do. He does that on a collective basis through his writing, his talks, his workshops and his collaborations. However, he also has done this for me on a personal basis for agreeing to be on the podcast twice and for engaging on Twitter regularly.

At some point, we are going to need someone to stand by us. And despite the evils of Twitter (and there are plenty) – there are also phenomenal opportunities to connect with others in solidarity.

Just some of the people who I feel standing by those of us who teach in higher ed include:

  • Sean Michael Morris (website; Twitter) – critical instructional design
  • Maha Bali (website; Twitter) – intercultural learning
  • Clint Smith III (website; Twitter) – spoken word poet, contributor to the Pod Save the People podcast, Harvard PhD student
  • Jesse Stommel (website; Twitter) – co-founder of Digital Pedagogy lab and Hybrid Pedagogy
  • Robin DeRosa (website; Twitter) – open education, interdisciplinary eduction
  • Chris G. (website; Twitter) – Digital redlining and privacy
  • Pooja Agarwal (website; Twitter) – Visit Pooja’s Retrieval Practice website, if you don’t already have it bookmarked
  • Laura Pasquini (website; Twitter) – Digital pedagogy, eclectic higher ed interests and experience
  • Isabeau Iqbal (website; Twitter) – Coaching, faculty development
  • James Lang (website; Twitter) – writer, faculty development
  • Viji Sathy (website; Twitter) – Inclusive active learning
  • Josh Eyler (website; Twitter) – His new book, How Humans Learn is available for preorder.
  • Laura Gibbs (website; Twitter) – If you use the Canvas LMS, check out Laura’s Canvas blog
  • Laura Gogia (website; Twitter) – Recently published a fascinating look at competency-based medical education
  • Jacinta (website; Twitter) – PhD student, inclusive teaching and learning
  • Angela Jenks (website; Twitter) – Anthropology professor
  • Annemarie Perez (website; Twitter) – Inclusive teaching and learning
  • Kevin Gannon (website; Twitter) – “History, teaching, and technology with a custom paint job”
  • Asao Inoue (website; Twitter) – Writing theory, antiracism, teaching, race theory, writing assessment
  • Katie Linder (website; Twitter) – Writer, podcaster, “learning like it’s her job”
  • Alan Levine (website; Twitter) – “Barking about and playing with the web since 1992 – and sharing it all openly”
  • Derek Bruff (website; Twitter) – Teaching and learning, faculty development
  • Sarah Rose Cavanagh (website; Twitter) – Psychologist, professor, writer, and faculty development
  • Peter Newbury (website; Twitter) – Teaching and learning
  • Stephanie Lancaster (website; Twitter) – “Occupational therapist, learning scientist, teacher, and an activist at heart.”

Twitter List compilation of all the above individuals and others

Your Turn

Who has been someone who has stood by you as an educator and encourage you to keep growing and changing?

Filed Under: Teaching

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