Teaching in Higher Ed

For students: How to be a lifelong learner

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Graduation2

I know many of you who are graduating. It is a time for celebration, but also a time of fear and anxiety. There are your concerns over what to choose as a career and what life will be like after college. The good news is that you could have very well written your last academic paper (unless you elect to attend graduate school). The bad news is that it will take more work now to maintain a posture of lifelong learning.

 

Here are five ways to ensure that learning never stops, even after graduation day:

Listen to podcasts in the car during your commute. I’m still amazed at how much new knowledge can be acquired during the drive to and from work. My favorites are APM’s Marketplace (business news) and Marketplace Money (financial literacy), Slate’s Daily Podcast (political gabfest, cultural gabfest, and the green lantern’s environmental stories), and Tony Campolo’s Podcast (sermons, talks and radio programs from the author, professor and speaker). I also listen to Creating a Family (talk about adoption and infertility) and just subscribed to The Chronicle of Higher Education's podcasts.

Get to know your local public library. I remember loving the library as a kid and making good use of Chapman’s library while I was there in the early 90s. Somehow I forgot how wonderful the library is as an adult. I rediscovered it a couple years back and love the opportunity to explore all that our local libraries have to offer. If you live in South Orange County and haven't visited the Mission Viejo Library, you're missing out on a wonderful part of our community. Your public library likely has the following all for free: DVDs, audio books you can listen to on your iPod, CD player or computer, magazines, newspapers, movie nights, author visits, and even a used bookstore to either donate to or support.

Find a mentor. We can sit back to wait until we find a person who gives us good advice, or we can be proactive and set up a mentoring relationship ourselves. Ask someone to mentor you and then set up regular times to get together to discuss your goals and challenges. Take the next step from there and set up a personal board of directors, where you have someone who you can ask questions about your personal finances (your CFO), another who you can talk to about branding yourself (your VP of marketing), and an individual who you consult when it comes time to negotiate salary at your new job (your VP of sales).

Set up RSS feeds for customized news updates. RSS stands for really simple syndication. Instead of having to read every industry publication or website, you can customize the news you receive and discipline yourself to spend a little time every day staying up to speed with what is going on in the world, in your industry, and in your area of expertise. Common Craft can get you up and running with RSS feeds in no time.

Friend learning organizations on Twitter. While Twitter is becoming widely known as the place to catch up with the latest on John Mayer or Ashton Kutcher, it is also a great place to keep up with learning.  The Wall Street Journal has a bunch of useful topics including: WSJWallet (personal finance), WSJBusiness, WSJManagement, WSJCareers, and WSJ. Subscribe to our Innovate Learning Twitter feed and we’ll sift through the masses and bring you the best in leadership and personal effectiveness.

Let us know how you remain a lifelong learner in the comments.

 

Five favorite iPhone apps for professors

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Iphoneapps

As busy as we faculty all are, it is wonderful having an iPhone to simplify our vocations somewhat. The following five iPhone applications have paid off in spades in terms of time saved and effectiveness gained.

 

 

Remember the Milk: This easy-to-use to do program can be accessed on the internet, on your iPhone application (it syncs), and it integrates with other services you may use such as Twitter and Jott. Start easy with entering tasks and entering due dates. As your skills grow, you can add tags to each task that associate it with specific classes and activity types (such as grading, meetings, and preparing). You can also set it up to text message your iPhone as far in advance of a task being due as you desire. COST: the application is free, but the $25 annual PRO membership is required. Well worth the expense.

 

 

Attendance: I discovered this application by reading about it in PC World. My hopes got quite high, as I thought about keeping attendance in real-time and not letting my sign-in sheets stack up quite so tall on my desk. This application has a slow learning curve and in no time, you’ll have your classes set up and can take roll with ease. I still use a sign-in sheet for the students, but immediately after the class can mark the entire roster as present and then one-by-one change the status of those students who were absent/late. COST: $3. No brainer in terms of time saved.

 

 

WorldCat: Type in an author, title, or category and find library resources nearby. The application uses your current location and when you type in what resource you’re searching for, it lets you know the closest libraries to you that have the item. COST: Free

 

 

Quick Checklists: This application is similar to Remember the Milk in that it tracks things, but it is better used for steps you go through on a frequent basis. Packing for a trip? Getting ready to speak at a conference? Have all the steps you’ll need to take or the things you’ll need to bring stored in a template and check the items off as you complete them. I create checklists for my first class (things I don’t want to forget to me ntion), as well as for the first day of school (until I’m back in the swing of things and remember the materials I’ll need for teaching). COST: $1

 

 

Evernote:This application can be accessed on your computer, on the web, and on your iPhone. It is a note-taking application that allows you to set up different notebooks and to have tags for each note you enter. Tags are similar to putting things in folders, only you can have the same item in multiple folders (if only we could do this with manila file folders without killing trees and taking up more space). My favorite feature on Evernote is the ability to take a picture of a whiteboard drawing that I’ve done. Evernote recognizes the text in photos and makes that content searchable, in addition to the content you’ve typed in. I prefer skipping meeting minutes for more informal meetings and storing the record of our conversations in Evernote. If I ever need to look back for when we discussed a particular issue, I can just type in the search box and it will search my white board verbiage, in addition to the rest of my notes. I don’t even have that good of penmanship and it does a superb job of recognizing the text. COST: Free

 

Let us know what other applications you have found useful as a college professor in the comments.

iPhone App perfect for faculty – take attendance with ease

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I'm getting ready for the new iPhone to [likely] be announced in June, but before then… not a day goes by that I don't think about the current iPhone's usefulness.

Attendance

Check out the Attendance application for the iPhone, which for $2.99 will make your attendance tracking much more streamlined. I still plan on having my students sign in (calling roll seems silly at their age and I teach classes of 45-50 most of the time). After each class, I can quickly update the information electronically and have it accessible on my iPhone anywhere and anytime.

Attendance also lets you email the information to yourself, making it that much easier to get the information into Excel for further number crunching. Each student can have a photo associated with their record, making learning names that much easier. The developer also regularly updates this application and is incredibly open to feedback.

Enjoy getting more efficient with the Attendance application. Let us know what other iPhone apps are helping you get more done.

For students: Five smart ways to manage your money

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Money

You can't watch the news today without some mention of the economic crisis. You may be experiencing financial troubles of your own. Here are five smart ways to manage your money, instead of letting it manage you.

  1. Know where you are. The easiest way to assess where you are is to use technology to help you track your money. We recently switched to the free online service www.mint.com and can't recommend it enough. How do they make their money? By recommending financial products that you would benefit from, based on your current situation (such as offering a credit card with a lower interest rate than what you're paying).
  2. Think about the future. Now that you know where you are, contemplate where you want to be… What are your long-term goals and how much money will it take to get there? CNN has a number of online calculators to help you figure out what it will take to achieve your long-term goals.
  3. Plan for the unexpected. It sounds like an oxymoron. How do you plan for things you aren't expecting? While we don't know whether our emergency will be a car accident, or a leaky toilet, there are always bound to be things that come up that we haven't budgeted for. Experts recommend six to nine months of liquid assets designated for emergencies. If you don't have any emergency funds, start today by putting a little aside at a time and you'll be surprised how quickly it will add up.
  4. Give [up] a little. If you add up how much your daily Starbucks costs, or your lunches out, you'll see that the little things quickly wind up as big expenses. Prioritize your spending and give up a few little things and reap the rewards of savings. Your coffee habit may be costing upwards of $2,000 a year that you could be putting toward meeting your long-term goals.
  5. Re-think what is important. When birthdays and special occassions come along, consider writing a heartfelt letter instead of purchasing a gift. Your words will be much more meaningful than whatever the gift you would buy might symbolize and you can start having deeper relationships that are based on more than traditional exchanges. I've started writing a list of things I'm thankful for about a particular person when it is his or her birthday. My list is as long as the number of years they've been on the earth.

If you only have time for one of the five, get started with www.mint.com. After that, you can come back and tackle two through five, based on what is most relevant to you and your current financial condition.

Let us know what other personal finance tips you have in the comments.