Teaching in Higher Ed

Inviting more ease into your week

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ease

I enjoyed the conversation with Natalie Houston immensely, which aired this past week in episode #034. She reminded us all to find ways to have more of a sense of ease in our lives.

She said:

Productivity, to me, is not about doing more things faster. It is about doing the things that are most important to me and creating the kind of life I want to have…

Here are a couple of opportunities for having more ease in my life that I discovered this week:

Set a timer to better enjoy breaks and conversations with students

Since the conversation with Natalie, I've been setting timers like crazy. While I had used this approach previously, she shed new light on the practice and inspired me to take more regular advantage of the focus on the moment.

I found a Tweet where Natalie coached a colleague who wanted motivation and concentration to:

I met with a few students this week and really felt more connected with the conversations in those times when I remembered to set a timer. There was one time when I neglected to do so, and I both wound up completely throwing off my schedule for the latter part of the afternoon, and wasn't as engaged as in the other “timed” conversations.

Natalie also offers these tips about using a timer while grading.

Install a custom style in Zotero, which enables you to create an annotated bibliography

This one is really more for my doctoral students than for me, though I treasure the opportunities to bring more ease into other people's lives. As a part of their program, they're asked a number of times to develop an annotated bibliography.

We also strongly encourage the use of the citations manager, Zotero. The annotated bibliography assignment hasn't aligned well with using the automated features in Zotero, since until now, I thought it could only “spit out” a list of sources, not something that included annotations.

Thanks to Emory Libraries and Information Technology, I found out I was wrong. Turns out, you can create a custom style in Zotero, or download one from their repository and leave the heavy lifting to others.

[reminder]How are you inviting more ease into your life this week?[/reminder]

Let’s get moving

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We had a little visitor come in to my night class this week.

I haven't seen students move that fast in the ten years I've been teaching.

get moving

Traditional gender roles were played out, perfectly, as the young women raced to the side of the room without a lizard, and the young men ran toward it with glee.

I'm proud to report that I just stood there, completely entertained.

Even though they are an engaged class, this incident brought about a whole new level of energy for the rest of the evening.

I particularly enjoyed how the presenters who went immediately after our lizard friend was evicted from the classroom, were able to incorporate the reptile into an example on Rawls' theory of justice.

There's just something that happens when we all get moving, students and faculty alike. To that end, here are some ideas for getting physical movement happening inside and outside the classroom:

Tape signs on the wall and have students give input via sticky notes

I've written previously about an exercise that uses sticky notes and gets students moving around the classroom.

There's also a PostIt Plus app that will allow you to capture the data, virtually, and then let you sort and move the individual sticky notes on your screen, as needed. As with any good app, there are plenty of sharing options made available.

Have students walk and talk

When I'm reviewing a concept that can sometimes be difficult for students to apply, I often have them take a walk around the building, while they talk to someone else in the class about the topic.

I make it clear that when they return from their walk, that I will be randomly calling on students, so that they feel a bit more pressure to stay on task during their walk.

I also always join with a group for the walk, or go with a student who doesn't have a partner. This always gives me one more opportunity for one-on-one interaction.

Use a FitBit

Fitness trackers are becoming all the rage these days. Those of us who use them know that they have the power to get us making all sorts of seemingly small changes that add up to signifiant change.

We take the stairs, park further away, and run around more with our kids.

The FitBit device tracks steps and flights of stairs. Dave and I both use one, though he likes the FitBit charge that goes on your wrist and I prefer the one you wear on the waist of your pants.

Consider a treadmill desk

When we finished off an extensive consulting project about a year ago, Dave and I decided to reward ourselves with a treadmill desk. He had wanted one for a while and I was ambivalent (but not opposed to spending the money, necessarily).

I didn't think I would use it that much, since I thought it would be too hard to maintain a train of thought.

It wound up being just the opposite experience. I find that I'm able to get into a flow and work longer and stay focused more than when I'm sitting at a desk.

We have a LifeSpan treadmill desk and both absolutely love it.

[reminder]What do you do to get your students (or yourself) moving?[/reminder]

Let's get moving

By | | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

We had a little visitor come in to my night class this week.

I haven't seen students move that fast in the ten years I've been teaching.

get moving

Traditional gender roles were played out, perfectly, as the young women raced to the side of the room without a lizard, and the young men ran toward it with glee.

I'm proud to report that I just stood there, completely entertained.

Even though they are an engaged class, this incident brought about a whole new level of energy for the rest of the evening.

I particularly enjoyed how the presenters who went immediately after our lizard friend was evicted from the classroom, were able to incorporate the reptile into an example on Rawls' theory of justice.

There's just something that happens when we all get moving, students and faculty alike. To that end, here are some ideas for getting physical movement happening inside and outside the classroom:

Tape signs on the wall and have students give input via sticky notes

I've written previously about an exercise that uses sticky notes and gets students moving around the classroom.

There's also a PostIt Plus app that will allow you to capture the data, virtually, and then let you sort and move the individual sticky notes on your screen, as needed. As with any good app, there are plenty of sharing options made available.

Have students walk and talk

When I'm reviewing a concept that can sometimes be difficult for students to apply, I often have them take a walk around the building, while they talk to someone else in the class about the topic.

I make it clear that when they return from their walk, that I will be randomly calling on students, so that they feel a bit more pressure to stay on task during their walk.

I also always join with a group for the walk, or go with a student who doesn't have a partner. This always gives me one more opportunity for one-on-one interaction.

Use a FitBit

Fitness trackers are becoming all the rage these days. Those of us who use them know that they have the power to get us making all sorts of seemingly small changes that add up to signifiant change.

We take the stairs, park further away, and run around more with our kids.

The FitBit device tracks steps and flights of stairs. Dave and I both use one, though he likes the FitBit charge that goes on your wrist and I prefer the one you wear on the waist of your pants.

Consider a treadmill desk

When we finished off an extensive consulting project about a year ago, Dave and I decided to reward ourselves with a treadmill desk. He had wanted one for a while and I was ambivalent (but not opposed to spending the money, necessarily).

I didn't think I would use it that much, since I thought it would be too hard to maintain a train of thought.

It wound up being just the opposite experience. I find that I'm able to get into a flow and work longer and stay focused more than when I'm sitting at a desk.

We have a LifeSpan treadmill desk and both absolutely love it.

[reminder]What do you do to get your students (or yourself) moving?[/reminder]

Testing out a new communication tool

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As anyone who has been listening to the podcast or reading this blog for a while knows, I'm a big fan of Remind for keeping in touch with students.

One of its strong points is that it is almost entirely a one-way communication channel from you to your students, with the exception of those students who have downloaded the Remind App and who respond with a thumbs up, or a question mark.

COMMUNICATION

I was so inspired by Bethany Usher in episode 27 to get my students doing some research and/or service learning projects.

I decided that my business ethics students are a good group to try something new out with this semester, since they are juniors and seniors and I know almost all of them from prior classes. However, having a good communication tool is paramount for something like this.

While we are still using Remind for messages that only need to come from me, we have decided to try out Slack.

What is Slack?

Slack is a cloud-based tool that is aspiring to take the place of email and keeps communication all in one place.

slack1It is somewhat like a chat board, but easily lets you attach files, include images, and categorize your talk around what they call channels. If you want to hear how a sandwich company uses Slack, you can check out their promotional video.

Our class now has the two channels that Slack sets up by default (#general and #random) and I also set up a channel for them to begin brainstorming their research and service learning projects.

Once a group determines what their project is going to be, I set up a channel for the group. That way, students only have to be engaged in conversations that are relevant to their work in the class, but I can check in to monitor their progress and make suggestions along the way.

Another powerful aspect of Slack is its ability to integrate with other services many of us use. I've already set it up with Dropbox and that's working seamlessly.

A couple of the students in the class are going to be planning our ethics competition event for the end of the semester. They will be using Slack for chats, but the project management piece will be taken care of by the online project planning site Asana, which fortunately integrates with Slack, too.

Besides my business ethics class, I also have my teaching assistant on both Slack and Asana. She says she likes how Slack organizes our messages by channel (as opposed to if we just texted to each other). I especially like how I can track when stuff gets done, through the Asana integration.

[reminder]Are you trying out any new communication tools this semester?[/reminder]

Assessing and tracking blogs

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I made the move a few years ago in my hybrid classes to stay mostly away from discussion forum posts. They tended to generate more of a transactional perception of the assignments.

Blogs seem to inspire people to do their best work, given the public nature of the assignments.

assessing and tracking blogs

Plus, if a person takes their blog seriously, they can be on their way to building a strong personal brand. Their data isn't locked behind an LMS, but is theirs to do with it what they want, after the class has ended.

Audrey Watters has been an advocate for providing students their their own online presence, one that isn't trapped in an LMS. On episode 18, she describes the University of Mary Washington's “A domain of one's own” initiative, in which they provide all incoming students their own website that gets transferred over to their ownership upon graduation.

Anyone who has made the switch from forums to blogs knows that it isn't anywhere near as efficient for the professor. You need to subscribe to all the students' blogs, manually, and commenting is nowhere near as easy as on an LMS.

The benefits far outweigh the challenges, though, so I continue to make use of blogging as an assignment in many of my courses.

Assessing blogs

The vast majority of the assignments in my courses are evaluated using a rubric. I've seen my fair share of atrocious blog rubrics and am continually striving to make mine better.

The best approach to assessment of blogs seems to be that they should be geared toward the learning outcomes for the course (as in that a generic blog rubric could not be used to adequately assess a blog).

This is a blog rubric that I've created for a doctoral course on leadership and technology in which the students develop a personal knowledge management (PKM) and use their blog as a means of sharing their work with others.

A new approach to tracking blogs

I use Feedly to subscribe to the cohort's blogs and then Newsify to actually read them. However, since the rubric calls for different types of posts each week, it is difficult for me to quantify them at the end of the term for grading purposes.

I wind up having to go back and manually count the students' posts to see if they blogged each week. It is also difficult because they don't always categorize their posts, according to the rubric, so I make my best effort to guess which type of post they were intending, a method that no doubt has its weaknesses.

Richard Byrne inspires

rbtweet

Relief came when I saw a Tweet from Richard Byrne about his approach to tracking blogs using a Google form.

I wish I would have implemented his approach over the summer and used it with my undergraduate students in the Fall. However, I didn't invest the time and wound up having both inefficiencies and needless student conflict without a more reliable means for tracking.

blogformsmMy Google form for tracking blog posts

I have modified Richard Byrne‘s approach slightly. Since my students are asked to write three posts per week, they have three places in which to paste their links.

Additionally, there is a place for them to indicate the type of post they are submitting. This should help steer the students toward the types of posts they're required to write each week, as well as making it easier for me to determine their intent.

I'm already excited about the time saving possibilities that this approach will provide.

It also seems like it will help reinforce the expectations for the students.

[reminder]Are you trying out any new approaches in your teaching this year to try to add some efficiencies into the grading process? [/reminder]