Resources

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:

• 2019 Top Tools for Learning
• 2018 Top Tools for Learning
• 2017 Top Tools for Learning
• 2016 Top Tools for Learning
• 2015 Top Tools for Learning

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.

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:

• Stephen Brookfield
• James Lang
• Cathy Davidson
• Clint Smith
• José Bowen
• Ken Bain
• Todd Zakrajsek
• Sean Michael Morris
• Betsy Barre
• Jesse Stommel
• Gardner Campbell
• Sara Rose Cavanagh
• Kevin Gannon

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.

I have been treasuring the opportunity to read about other educators’ lives during this time, as they share with such rawness and candor. It helps to feel less alone.

Here are just some of the posts that have touched my heart and ignited my imagination in some way.

Care Is a Practice; Care is Pedagogical, by Jesse Stommel

Jesse shares about his Mom’s health challenges that drew their family to move across the country and their daughter’s early understandings of the permanence of death. He also describes the ways in which the Open Online Office Hours have brought educators from around the world together in solidarity.

During one of the office hours sessions, they learned that Jesse's husband was being laid off, news which is normally delivered in person, but came via a webcam this time. Finally, he recommends we carefully read our institutions reopening plans and attempt to discern the values being expressed and enacted.

Voices First, Faces Second: Beyond the Tweet, by Maha Bali

I used to require my students to have their camera on during classes. This was in the context of teaching doctoral classes and I packed all kinds of privilege in my choice to establish those rules. Now, I can see things in a lot more nuanced of a way, though I always allow students to make that choice for themselves.

Maha reveals her own desire to be able to see the students she is teaching, but she also knows some of the reasons they may prefer leaving their cameras off. She describes other approaches we can use to have those more human connections beyond a stringent requirement. She asserts that we should first center students' voices, then attempt to get to see their faces. “Voices first, faces second.”

Flipping the Screen Time Conversation into a Meaningful Activity Exploration, by Maha Bali

Dave and I used to have very different approaches to our kids’ screen time than we do now. It was a maximum of one hour per day, with some days not having any time in front of screens at all. Now? Let’s just say they are engaging in school remotely right now – and have what we call “choice time” around here in the afternoons, which usually results in playing Minecraft. A lot of Minecraft.

Maha changed the conversation for me around screen time by thinking through it in the context of what is being done with those screens. Our kids have had the opportunity to play Minecraft with Maha’s daughter (“O”) probably ten times by now. We were able to connect them right as “O” was just starting Minecraft. At first, I was concerned about the many cultural differences I knew would pop up in there. But Maha’s humor and direct communication style made me less afraid and more excited about the tremendous opportunities before us all.

I think about context pretty much every day of my life.

We create way too many dichotomous choices in our lives and the lives of others. Context seems to always be the road toward better-discerned decisions and greater opportunities for connections with people who view things differently than we do.

Video: Recommended Zoom Settings, by Teddy Svornos

I almost didn’t watch this video, thinking that I have settings pretty figured out on Zoom and so do my students. However, I was in for a treat. In two minutes, Teddy shares how he recommends his students set up their Zoom settings within the context of using a smallish laptop so that they can actively learn while participating in class.

Here’s a taste of what he recommends, but I totally think it is better to watch it.

• “Keep video on, if your circumstances allow.”
• “Each class revolves around a handout” (and how to not have it take over your entire screen, when he is sharing it)
• Make these non-full screen settings permanently, in settings
• Use gallery view, while he is sharing the handout, and side-by-side mode (change the size of that portion of the window, using the slider bar)
• Merge to meeting window – chat and/or participants (only works if you’re not in full screen, which I didn’t realize)
• Change to speaker view when he has a camera on his whiteboard

I recommend you subscribe to Teddy’s Tech Notes in your RSS reader of choice, as he is excellent at providing guidance on teaching, educational technology, and productivity.

If you aren’t yet using an RSS reader/aggregator, check out Inoreader. Laura Gibbs is the person who first told me about Inoreader. She has this post from 2015, which still reads as very relevant (in terms of Inoreader tips) today, about how she organizes things in Inoreader. I use folders, subscribe to all “email newsletters” now via Inoreader, so they come into my RSS reader vs into my email, and read/unread.

These are just a few articles (and one video) that have stood out to me in recent weeks. I'm grateful for the generous ways educators are acting in solidarity with one another during this awful time. I can see so much life and beauty amidst the pain and devastation. 

I recently picked up Josh Eyler’s How Humans Learn, again, to prepare for a talk I gave this past week at Tarleton State University for their Center for Instructional Innovation. It did not disappoint. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I highly suggest you pick up a copy. Also, my thanks goes out to all the people I met at Tarleton State University this week. The stories you shared about how Teaching in Higher Ed has impacted your teaching were edifying to me and I'm honored to have had the opportunity to come to visit and share about curiosity with you in person at the conference. 

With curiosity on my mind in recent weeks, I decided to blog about things that have come up that sparked my interest and made me want to learn more. Below, you will hear about a new feature in Canva that I am enjoying experimenting with… You will also discover the ways I am pursuing habits more than goals these days. Finally, I will share about my exploration of Notion – a website that seeks to be an all-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, calendars, and more.

Incorporating Background Video in a Slide Deck

The theme of the talk was on curiosity and I found this short video clip of a cat looking around in a slightly inquisitive way to use as one of the slides. Canva must have recently added stock video to their service, which got me to thinking about how to experiment with it for this talk. I like that the cat isn’t doing anything too dramatic, or I think it could be too much of a drag on people’s cognitive load.

Then, I realized that it probably wasn’t going to work for me, since I would likely be working from Glisser and the video looked like it was only playable if I presented the slide deck from within Canva. That’s when things got truly exciting.

I discovered that there’s a way to export the video as a .mp4 (video file), which I will be able to add to YouTube, in order to have it play within Glisser. It says that it is still in beta, but it worked perfectly for me when I tried it.

Habits vs Goals

Many of the productivity experts I follow have been asserting that habits are far greater than goals. Episode 90 of the Focused podcast, for example, was titled Habits > Goals and looked at how establishing habits can help us achieve our goals better than just having identified them and trying to take individual steps toward them.

I continue to love the Full Focus Planner from Michael Hyatt. It has a section dedicated to two types of goals. Achievement goals are the kinds we are used to hearing about. Write a book. Hire a new faculty member. Finish a promotion and tenure portfolio.

Habit goals are less-often discussed. I already had an achievement goal that I keep track of on Goodreads. I was able to read 24 books during 2019, but in the end, it was unclear to me if I was actually going to be able to achieve the goal. I barely made it. However, for 2020, I have emphasized a habit goal related to reading and am going to fly past that 24 books count by the end of March, it’s looking like…

The habit I am emphasizing is taking my Kindle to bed to do my nightly reading, instead of using the iPad. My goal is to do that at least four nights per week. However, it has been so enjoyable that I find I am practicing the new habit a lot more often than that.

The app I’m using to track the habits I have established for 2020 is called Streaks. It automatically tracks my goal of closing my rings on my Apple Watch. It is also able to track a four-day-a-week goal, like my Kindle vs iPad one. And a whole bunch of other types of habit goals.

Two books related to this curiosity of mine that I purchased but haven’t quite started reading are:

• Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, by James Clear

I know that many of you who are reading these words have read them, as they come highly recommended. I am looking forward to discovering even further how habits can help me achieve my goals. I am also prepared to learn a thing or two about the importance of rest and how to get more of it in my life. 

Notion

Finally, I have been playing around with Notion quite a bit. The first time I was able to use Notion was when I copied Mike Caufield’s Check, Please! Starter Course over to my new Notion account. In case you’re interested in his course, too, here’s a description of it:

“In this course, we show you how to fact and source-check in five easy lessons, taking about 30 minutes apiece. The entire online curriculum is two and a half to three hours and is suitable homework for the first week of a college-level module on disinformation or online information literacy, or the first few weeks of a course if assigned with other discipline-focused homework.”

Mike Caulfield made it such that people can copy it over to our own Notion accounts and customize it to meet our individual needs. He just asks that any instances of it link back to his original course, so people are able to find their way back to where it all started.

The more I kept hearing people talk about Notion, the more I thought it might be a good idea to check it out for myself. I started to put some workflows up there to teach people how to edit stuff on my departmental website. It is really easy to learn and can be used in a myriad of ways.

Here’s an example from Thomas Frank on YouTube how he uses Notion to track all of the production steps for his online videos. And below are a few more Notion resources:

• 23 Notion Tips, Hacks & Tricks
• Top 15 Notion Tips for Beginners
• A Beginner’s Guide to Notion

Dave and I are starting to talk about putting the workflows for our respective podcasts on Notion and seeing what else it can do for us.

Your Turn

What has ignited your curiosity in recent weeks?

For the first time in Teaching in Higher Ed history, we are taking the show on the road.

We have been invited to partner with Digital Pedagogy Lab at their new location in Denver, Colorado. Many of this year’s 2020 Lab faculty have also been guests on Teaching in Higher Ed.

That includes people like:

• Robin DeRosa
• Amy Collier
• Bonnie Stewart
• Kevin Gannon
• Kris Shaffer

There are also plenty of individuals who have long been on my list of people I would love to interview for the podcast. What a tremendous opportunity to get to connect with individuals who have shaped my teaching in such powerful ways for all these years.

Sean Michael Morris explains the formation of our partnership as follows:

“Because Digital Pedagogy Lab offers courses and conversations about similar topics and as the Lab has also featured many of the same speakers as Teaching in Higher Ed–we feel this partnership is a perfect fit, and will give Lab participants even more to enjoy.”

We will also be providing a lens into the event for those who are unable to attend in person. I am going to be experimenting a bit with audio storytelling and attempting to capture a less linear version of the DPL conversations than how the podcast interviews are typically structured. I also plan on holding more traditional conversations with some of the teachers and fellows.

Finally, I am very excited to announce that will be broadcasting Teaching in Higher Ed live from Digital Pedagogy Lab on July 28, 2020 at 4:30pm Mountain / 6:30pm Eastern. More information on the broadcast, once we have figured out what we are doing.

View Time/Date on World Time Buddy – and add to your calendar

Note: Anyone who is reading this with advice on what tools to use for live podcast recordings is encouraged to share your recommendations with us. We would appreciate your guidance, especially on the recording a podcast live part of this adventure.

As Sean Michael Morris shared on the DPL website:

“We believe this is an exciting partnership for everyone who attends or has wanted to attend Digital Pedagogy Lab. Stay tuned for more information about Teaching in Higher Ed at DPL 2020.”

We hope to see some of you in person at Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020.

And by we, I do mean we. Dave and the kids will be there with me. Since this is the first time I'm attempting to do something like this, it will be nice to have some backup. The kids' podcasting skills aren't quite matched with Dave's, but no doubt they will keep us entertained.

Photo cred:  Cassie Gallegos on Unsplash