Teaching in Higher Ed

2021 Top Tools for Learning: My Vote

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Tools4Learning - Jane Hart's annual survey

I’m excited to participate this year, once again, in Jane Hart’s Top Tools 4 Learning. It is the 15th time she has conducted the survey. In more recent years, Jane asked us to separate our list of ten tools into the following three contexts:

  • Personal Learning
  • Workplace Learning
  • Education

She then lists the top 200 results across all of the categories, as well as listing a top 100 for each category.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t participate last year. But I do have blog posts for the following years:

As a person who enjoys it when I have a long streak of something going, I also want to be gentle with myself regarding what it has been like to attempt to keep even the simplest of things going during a pandemic. I avoid looking back at my own Top Tools for Learning prior posts, as well as Jane Hart’s listings, until after I have written the current year’s post. That way, I avoid biasing myself, given all the great tools there are to support our learning.

Top Ten Tools for Learning

Below, I present to you my 2021 list (which hopefully can make up for my lack of a list in 2020). In no particular order, the following are my Top Ten Tools for Learning:

Raindrop.io | Personal Learning | Digital bookmarking tool | Having the ability to save links and be able to easily resurface them later on is essential to my Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) system.

Overcast | Personal Learning | Podcast catcher | Despite not having as much time during the pandemic for podcast listening, I still treasure those episodes that I am able to consume. The reason I use Overcast is due to it’s smart speed function (set how fast you want to listen to particular podcasts and it keeps that setting saved) and the ability to share clips of episodes easily.

Twitter | Personal Learning | Microblogging + social media network | On Episode 53 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Peter Newbury explained his method for who to follow on Twitter in that he connects with people who are like him, along with people who are not like him. I have carried that advice with me since that conversation in 2015 and have benefitted richly from it.

Readwise | Personal Learning | Digital reading highlights manager | Have you ever gone to purchase a book, only to have the book seller’s website tell you that you had already bought it? Have you ever went to read a book, only to discover you read it years ago? Readwise helps resurface the highlights that you have saved from a number of digital sources. You can save highlights from Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper, PDF documents, Inoreader, Evernote, and a whole lot of other services. Their tagline explains the functionality well: “Readwise helps thousands of readers get the most out of their digital highlights.”

Inoreader | Personal Learning | RSS feed aggregator | Rather than trying to remember to visit every website that might have information that is relevant to me, I use RSS (real simple syndication) to subscribe to various feeds, so all the information comes into one place. Inoreader is an RSS aggregator (meaning it “collects” all the things I want to subscribe to and keeps track of what I have read and what remains unread). To read my RSS feeds, I prefer to use Unread. When reading RSS feeds using the Unread app on my iPad, I can browse articles and mark things as read using only my thumb.

Zoom | Education | Web conferencing | While there are other web conferencing tools that attempt to ‘catch up’ with Zoom on a sustained basis, I still have found no other tool that comes even close. Zoom is easy to get started with, handles lower bandwidth situations with ease, and continues to innovate without allowing their usability to diminish.

Canva | Workplace Learning | Graphic design creator | I have two different Canva Pro accounts (personal and work), because it has that much benefit. For each context, I can have our various logos, color scheme(s), and photos/graphics uploaded and saved.

Blubrry | Workplace Learning | Podcast hosting | If you want to have a podcast that goes out to be listed among the various platforms/services, you will need a podcast hosting company. Teaching in Higher Ed has been a part of my life since June of 2014 and has contributed more to my learning than any single other effort I’ve undertaken since then.

Google Jamboard | Education | Collaborative sticky notes and simple drawings/text | Whenever I’m with a group of people, I can invite them to “join” me on Google Jamboard to collaborate by adding sticky notes, text, and simple shapes to a shared canvas.

Loom | Education | Screencasting | I use Loom in my teaching, work, and personal lives multiple times a day. When I have a quick thing I want to “show” someone, I can record my screen quickly and copy a link to the resulting video with a single click. I can also include my web cam and do a video with something on my screen, or just the camera, alone.

 

Would you like to submit a vote with your Top Tools for Learning? You can fill out a form, write a blog post, or even share your picks on Twitter. The 2021 voting will continue through Thursday, August 26 and the results will be posted by Wednesday, September 1.

Standing Presenting Set-Up

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I gave a couple of talks this month that I wanted to share a bit with you. First, David Rhoads and I joined Bryan Beatty to discuss the myths and truths of Hyflex Learning. I also shared at the Lilly Conference about igniting our collective imagination. Each of those two links has the associated resources on them and more information. However, during the Lilly Conference one, I got asked a fair amount of questions about my standing set up in the chatbox, which I didn't anticipate.

When I saw the question, I joked that I was not going to be held up as a model for standing setups. I had used this bendable tripod thingy with a screw sticking out of the top of it and tried to balance my webcam on top of the screw. I'm not sure if the camera was straight at any point in my presentation. Two of the three legs of the tripod blocked my already-poor view of the Zoom window and the other application I was using to run my slide-deck and polling. I used one of our kids' upholstered chairs to raise my keyboard up a bit and had my trackpad resting in the seat of the chair.

Let's just say it wasn't ideal.

Trent Tucker came to the rescue on Twitter. He tweeted: “…as luck would have it, I ran into a colleague at #myTRU who has the stand-up teaching set-up I was looking for! Cranks the desk up, rolls the whiteboard into place, webcam on… stand-up teaching!”

Trent later described what things look like before John Ofee transforms the desk to the standing setup:

“Hi Bonni — I have permission from @john_ofee to share this. It's his office and set-up, I took the photo and doctored it up. Here is the “before” picture — it's a regular office then it transforms into super stand-up teaching space from the other photo. Happy blogging.”

A friend from work said his wife was really liking her stand that converts her desk to a standing desk, so I bought a similar one. I like it a lot, from a functionality standpoint. However, it was too wide to fit the part of my desk where my monitor sits. I'm thinking it will head to work with me when I one day return and will likely work better there.

Now Dave and I are thinking that I should look for an independent tripod that would raise my webcam up high enough to not give me the appearance of having four chins (my words, not his). My goal is to have things up and running well by the time I speak at the Musical Theatre Educators Alliance's conference in early January 2021. Standing for that one seems most important… I'm working hard at keeping the bad musical theatre puns to myself for the event, as well. “Ya Got Trouble – Right Here in River City…” In all seriousness, I couldn't be more excited and honored to join them for the conference.

One purchase that has worked out well in my setup is this light that sits atop my monitor. It's LED can be adjusted in two ways: brightness and tone (warm/cool). It has a dimmer on it and a power button (that unfortunately I keep forgetting to turn off when I leave my computer for the day; I'm thinking of seeing if there is some kind of automation I can use for this situation).

It needs to be shut off when I'm on any kind of web conference tool, or it makes my webcam adjust awkwardly and put me in the shadows. But it works great for when I tuck my computer and keyboard away and work on analog tasks. Speaking of pen and paper tools, I recently received an early Christmas gift, which I initially heard about from Katie Linder. Here's Katie's recent answer to the question: Will I Use PowerSheets in 2021? I've gotten as far as putting my name in the front and looking through everything that came in the PowerSheets bundle I received.

 

No Magic Required

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More than ever before, I witnessed this semester testing the limits of our espoused descriptions of what it means to be a teacher. Is it about us fostering and cultivating learning communities, or is it really more about misguided attempts to control others' behavior? Is deep learning a complex process that takes place across unpredictable spans of time, or is what we do able to be planner out in a linear way toward a rigid destination?

I received an email from Marjorie Feld (Babson College) that shares the story of her last day of class this semester. She gave me permission to share her story here with the other Teaching in Higher Ed blog posts:

November 20, 2020

On the last day of class for the semester, standing there in my mask, I talked about Harry Potter.

I was co-teaching a course with 50 students, split into two groups: a few in-person in the de-densified physical classroom; most of them online, linking into class from campus and from places across the U.S. and across the world. On this last day, only my co-teacher and I were masked in the classroom, and all of our students were on screen in tiny boxes, learning remotely. I know my colleagues drew from more classic literary works about plagues and other crises when talking to students about our present moment in the pandemic; I used Harry Potter as a way to communicate my gratitude to them.

In all honesty, I told our students, in August I hesitated before entering the classroom. Even with the masks (worn faithfully by all) and the regular testing (completed faithfully by all), there was anxiety about what it would mean to be in a room, on campus, learning together. The anxiety, though, wasn’t just about the virus, I pointed out. It was also about how we could create a learning community in the midst of all of this. Never had I taught online, I told them, and I have always relied on students’ being together in one space, seeing and hearing each other’s responses to texts and to each other.

At our best, I said, we teachers hope to help you learn from each other, to help move you a bit further on your journey toward a good job, a fulfilling life, and good global citizenship. We strive to keep our classrooms safe for you to try on, and try out, new ways of thinking. In here, I said, gesturing around the classroom, I try my best to try to accommodate everyone’s learning preferences, to shield everyone from negative forces during our moments together so that we can all feel heard and visible.

In the final book and film of the Harry Potter series, the forces of evil try to enter Hogwarts, the school where young people learn the magic they need to become witches and wizards. The teachers know that these forces are on their way, and they do the only thing they can: they summon their own magical powers as older, more experienced witches and wizards, and they cast a spell on the school to protect the young people, however temporarily, from evil.

Brimming with emotion, I told my students that this semester, though many of us wanted to protect our students from the negative forces of our moment—namely, of course, the virus—we knew we could not. I thanked them for wearing masks, for getting tested, for keeping themselves safe; I thanked them for tuning into the class, for learning and laughing and trying on, and trying out, new ways of thinking. They could not see that I was smiling under my mask when I said that we managed to create a learning community. To me, that felt like both a victory and a bit of an antidote to the bleak news of 2020. Soon after I finished saying this, they logged off of our last class together.

Ultimately, in the Harry Potter narrative, good prevails. There is incalculable loss, to be sure. But the students who remained in the protected school: they learn how to fight the bad forces together. They grow up to recognize the essential importance of communities, not only in learning, but in taking action to protect what is important. Now that my teaching is done, I hang onto my hope that this is what we are teaching all of our young people right now, wherever they are learning. No magic is required; just hope and the will and actions to protect and heal the world.

Marjorie N. Feld, Babson College

Thank you, Marjorie, for sharing your story about your final day of class with us and for getting in touch. The ways in which you remained true to your teaching philosophy and navigated these challenging circumstances is admirable and inspiring.

Recommended Digital Bookmarking Tool: Raindrop.io

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Raindrop.io screenshot

Dave and I don’t change our tools very often. Instead, we try to use as few of them as possible and continually work to learn new ways to leverage these systems and applications in our learning and work. However, in recent months, we both switched our Digital bookmarking service from Pinboard.in over to Raindrop.io.

Pinboard.in served us well for years. I had over 30,000 bookmarks stored since I joined in 2014. I moved over from the Del.icio.us bookmarking service, when it’s long-term future looked questionable. Pinboard.in is a simple way of collecting and categorizing bookmarks in one place. It had recently become rather slow when running in the browser, as well as not always reliably saving my bookmarks when I was on a mobile device and using a third-party app.

raindrop-io-interface

When I first looked at Raindrop.io, I was blown away by its gorgeous user interface. Instead of categorizing purely by applying tags to bookmarks (like Pinboard.in does), Raindrop.io also makes use of Collections, which are like folders. When I initially saw the organization by Collection, I thought that this would be a limitation for me, given that I save items that would apply across various categories. However, I soon discovered that searching can be done across all manner of filters, so I wasn’t going to lose the functionality I had grown so accustomed to when using Pinboard.in.

Getting Started

The first step for me in getting started with Raindrop.io was to experiment with it for a bit. I installed the Mac app and iOS app. They also have a Windows app and an app on Google Play. I created an account and signed in on the apps.

I set up a couple of Collections to see how that worked. I like how you can use their extensive collection of icons to visually distinguish your categories from one another. Even better, I appreciate how I can upload custom icons. Our university has some design elements that I instantly associate with that entity, which I used for my work-related Collections. I later added my Bitmoji for personal bookmarks.

browser options

The next step in getting started was to add the Raindrop.io extension to my browser, so I could easily add bookmarks when browsing the web. They have support for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Edge, and a Raindrop.io Bookmarklet that may be used for unsupported browsers.

Once I signed into the Raindrop.io extension, I was ready to start adding bookmarks. I instantly noticed how much faster Raindrop.io was, as well as offering more features to access within the single browser extension. I could select the Collection to place the bookmark within, as well as add any associated tags. It was very intuitive to use from the very beginning.

The last part of getting started was to connect Raindrop.io within my preferred RSS Reader – Unread. That way, while I was reading articles from all my various RSS feeds on Unread, I could quickly save items within a category and apply tags. I do this by long-pressing on the title of an article and accessing Raindrop.io via the share sheet. I could do it even faster by setting up the double-tap to automatically save to Raindrop.io, but it doesn’t appear to allow me to enter a tag as I’m saving it. I have found that if I don’t add the tags at the same time as I’m saving an item, I can get a serious backlog of bookmarks when I finally sit down to tag everything.

Collections

Another nice feature of Raindrop.io’s Collections is the ability to collaborate with others. I’ve set up a Collection for our Institute for Faculty Development. Now, whenever any of us comes across bookmarks related to our work, we can save them in one place and have others automatically have access to them, as well.

We are only getting started with this practice, so I don’t know yet how tags are going to work. I would assume that whatever tags my colleagues add here will then get added into mine. If we want to really be able to future-proof our bookmarking efforts, it is going to make sense to come up with some naming conventions for our tags.

If you don’t want to have someone to be able to add to your bookmarks, but want them to be able to view an entire Collection, there’s an option for that, as well. You can either invite specific individuals to view a Collection, or can create a shareable link.

I see on the Raindrop.io planned improvements that there are (as of 11/29/20) 493 upvotes to “Pin one bookmark into multiple collections,” which to me would be a great enhancement to Raindrop.io. I was the 493rd upvote. The developer is very responsive to user feedback and continually improves the service, from everything I can tell so far.

Tags

The power in really being able to organize information comes from tags, since they can carry across multiple categories and contexts. A single bookmark may belong in the following collections: Reference, technology, classes, teaching, and higher education. I wind up picking the most logical Collection and add in the tags that will help me find the item in the future.

This morning, I listened to an episode of The Productivity Show: 5 GTD Tips to Become a Power User and Get Things Done Consistently (TPS322).

Here are the tags I applied to it, along with the rationale for each one.

  • #audio – When adding media to my bookmarks, I like to indicate the type of item I’m saving, whether it is audio content or video.
  • #AsianEfficiency – They are the creators of this podcast and also have a great blog. I like to be able to search by the content creator, whether it be a person, or an organization.
  • #GTD – Getting Things Done, a productivity system articulated by David Allen in the book by the same name
  • #mgmt470 – I teach a management elective class called: Personal Leadership and Productivity. When I find items related to any class, I like to add a tag with the class name to help me be able to surface new content to add to the course over time.

Dave thinks I may have gotten carried away with tags across my years of digital bookmarking. He may be onto something. As of today, I have 4,265 tags. In listening to another podcast episode this morning, one of the co-hosts said, “Tags don’t cost anything,” which helped me feel a bit more vindicated.

If I were starting over, again, though, I would be more purposeful in deciding on whether to use singular vs plural for tag naming conventions. In some cases, I have done that.

For example:

  • #podcasts – are the actual shows I have saved
  • #podcasting – is the creation of podcasts
  • #podcast – is a hashtag I use on Twitter when sharing quotes from the Teaching in Higher Ed #podcast. I have it set up to automatically bookmark tweets that I like or retweet, so adding this to Raindrop.io happens automatically.

If you have gone down the path of sometimes tagging an item with a tag expressed in the singular, while other times adding a tag as a plural, you can combine the two tags together. I see on the Raindrop.io website that it is possible to merge tags, but I haven’t figured that piece out just yet.

Perfectionism and ongoing personal knowledge management don’t go together very well. I can always search a couple of ways to find what I’m looking for, until such a non-existent time when I clean everything up perfectly.

Next Steps

If you don’t already use a digital bookmarking system, I highly suggest you check out Raindrop.io. As stated on the Raindrop.io home page:

“Raindrop.io is the best place to keep all your favorite books, songs, articles or whatever else you come across while browsing.”

And if you would like to learn more about personal knowledge management, there's an entire section of my book devoted to it. Check out The Productive Online and Offline Professor on the Stylus Publishing website. Part Three explores finding, curating, and sharing knowledge and there's a chapter dedicated to Three Steps to Social Bookmarking. 

Also: Productivity Tools List on the Teaching in Higher Ed Website

Most-Downloaded Teaching in Higher Ed Episodes in 2020

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most downloaded episodes 2020

Terry Greene, host of the Gettin’ Air podcast, asked some of us on Twitter to guess what was the all-time most downloaded episode of his show. I thought perhaps the episode with Chris Gilliard or the one with Audrey Watters. Terry finally satisfied our curiosity by sharing that it was in fact John Stewart who held that honor.

Blog Post: Gettin’ Air Top Ten

In the tweet where I presented my guess, I mentioned that the time of the year when a Teaching in Higher Ed episode airs seems to contribute greatly to the total number of downloads that a given episode will receive. Yes, having recognizable names matters. But so does airing episodes at times when faculty are coming back from a break and are ready to dive back into ways to develop our teaching even further.

Terry’s post got me wondering about Teaching in Higher Ed’s most downloaded episodes. Around the million downloads mark, Dave and I switched podcast hosts (from Libsyn over to Blubrry), so it is just way to cumbersome to do analysis across the entire history of the show.

Before we moved podcast hosts in early 2019, episodes with the following people were always among the most downloaded:

Speaking of downloads, I noticed the other day that Teaching in Higher Ed had crossed over another one-million downloads mark – meaning that the podcast has now been downloaded over two million times, in total.

It is staggering for me to think about all that has transpired since the first show back in June of 2014. I’m eternally grateful to all the people who have come on the show to share with the Teaching in Higher Ed community.

After reading Terry’s blog post about his downloads this morning, I thought I would take a look at Teaching in Higher Ed’s downloads (totals started being counted in February of 2019 since that’s the month when we switched hosting companies).

  1. Episode 263 with Elizabeth Barkley | Recipes for Effective Teaching
  2. Episode 258 with Sara Goldrick-Rab | Paying the Price
  3. Episode 254 with Jared Cooney Horvath | Stop Talking, Start Influencing
  4. Episode 256 with Paul Hanstedt | Creating Wicked Students
  5. Episode 309 with David Rhoads | Hyflex Learning
  6. Episode 324 with Dan Levy | Teaching Effectively with Zoom
  7. Episode 273 with Bonni Stachowiak | Engaging Learners in Large Classes
  8. Episode 253 with José Bowen | Spaces and Places (and Nudges)
  9. Episode 291 with Michelle Miller | Learning Myths and Realities
  10. Episode 271 with David Gooblar | The Missing Course
  11. Episode 269 with Jennifer Pusateri | Removing Learning Barriers with Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
  12. Episode 282 with Michael Wesch | Using Challenges to Motivate Learners
  13. Episode 252 with Maha Bali + Autumm Caines | Ownership, Equity, and Agency in Faculty Development
  14. Episode 277 with Derek Bruff | Intentional Tech
  15. Episode 320 with Jesse Stommel | How to Be Together in Learning
  16. Episode 295 with Travis N. Thurston | Online Engagement Through Digital PowerUps
  17. Episode 290 with Bonni Stachowiak | The Productive Online and Offline Professor
  18. Episode 272 with Viji Sathy + Kelly Hogan | Inclusified Teaching Evaluation
  19. Episode 259 with Natasha Jankowski | Intentional + Transparent Assessment
  20. Episode 279 with Brian Laduca | Applied Creativity for Transformation

It is always somewhat hard for me to make a list like this because there are so many incredible episodes that wind up being missed. But it is also fun at the same time to reflect on what I learned from these conversations. Thanks, Terry, for giving me the inspiration to go through this exercise today.