I received a question from a listener regarding making more engaging slide decks that I thought I would answer here on the blog.

“On one episode I listened to last year, I think you mentioned someone who has a website with suggestions for making better powerpoint presentations? Does this ring a bell? I've had a search on your website, but can't find it. I wanted to improve my approach to slide-making before the term starts shortly.”

Here are some ideas for you to take your slide-making to the next level. Thanks for writing in to inquire.

Podcast Episodes

• Episode 33 – The Slide Heard ‘Round the World – Bonni and Dave Stachowiak talk about how to make your presentation slides more effective.

Blog Posts

• Tools for Better Presentations, by Bonni Stachowiak
• Top Presentation Slide Decks, by Mike Taylor
• iPad Unleashed: My New Wireless Lecture Setup, by Doug McKee
• Present at Work; Storytelling at Work, by Tomas Bay

Books

• Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, by Nancy Duarte
• Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds
• Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations, by Garr Reynolds

Resources

• Nancy Duarte’s site
• Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Tips
• 4 Tips and 1 Tool That Will Help You Perfect Your Slide Design, by Catrinel Bartolomeu

Your Turn

What advice do you have for creating more effective slide decks? 

Dave and I met while getting our master’s degrees in organizational leadership. Later on down the road, we both pursued our doctorates together. Our marriage is stronger, in part, because we speak a similar language when it comes to leadership.

Our similarities go beyond our common discipline. We are also both pretty geeky (the Apple Keynotes used to be considered a romantic date around here), enjoy learning right along with our children, and we each have the privilege of getting to host our own podcasts.

Dave’s podcast is: Coaching for Leaders

Over the years, he has been able to interview some of the big names from our respective educations and lifelong learning pursuits:

• Peter Block (episode 328), author of The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work (one of my all-time favorite reads from our graduate education, which recently had an update)
• Susan Cane (episode 44), author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won’t Stop Talking
• John Kotter (episode 249), author of Leading Change
• Adam Grant (episode 238), author of Give and Take
• David Allen (episode 184), author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity

Dave isn’t the only one in our family who gets to talk with authors we admire. I have been able to talk with many of the well-known writers in the higher education context for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, including:

• Stephen Brookfield (episodes 147, 98, & 15), author of The Skillful Teacher (and a gazillion other books)
• Ken Bain (episodes 146 & 36), author of What the Best College Teachers Do
• Cathy Davidson (episodes 169 & 28), author of The New Education
• Cathy O’Neil (episode 170), author of Weapons of Math Destruction
• James Lang (episodes 92, 210, & 19), author of Small Teaching

Last week, I had the absolute honor of getting to speak to another author, but someone writing in a different context. My conversation for this episode had me talking with the civil rights activist DeRay McKesson about his new book:

On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope*

Usually, when I have interviewed authors in the past, friends and colleagues have shared in the dialog about the person’s work, before I get to speak to the author. This time, I finished reading On the Other Side of Freedom at around 9:30 pm the night before I was scheduled to speak with DeRay and wasn’t able to bounce ideas and thoughts with anyone, in advance.

He was gracious in the few minutes we spent talking before the interview started. I had seen on Twitter that it was Aretha Franklin’s funeral, but it did take me a minute to decipher what he was saying about being in a rush to check out of his hotel and get over to Aretha’s coming home.

I try not to write too much on this blog about all the times I get nervous to interview someone for the podcast. If I considered myself to be a magnificent writer, maybe I would perceive that these kinds of stories would be fascinating to people. However, I can’t really continue with this story without mentioning that my entire body was bursting with adrenaline at this point. I kept giving myself all these instructions about what to say and what not to say to DeRay with every passing moment.

When he brought up Franklin’s passing, I instantly flashed to my college days. A friend had been talking about how much she liked her music, only she pronounced her name “urethra.”

I seriously think we have been getting decades’ worth of laughs over this moment in time by now. In my brief, introductory conversation with DeRay, I kept telling myself, “Don’t say her name. Don’t say her name. You know you’re going to get it wrong and he’s going to have the worst first impression of you. Don’t say her name.”

This was all happening in the context of me knowing that I can get confused over words. I once stood in front of over 100 human resources leaders and asserted that “It was a speculum.” What I had intended to say was “spectrum,” but that wasn't what came out of my mouth. After my awkward pause when I tried to determine if I had just said what I thought I had said, my reaction generated more laughter than I may have ever experienced when speaking. I think everyone was relieved that I could have a sense of humor about my mistake. I may also have endeared myself to them with my brief mention of our many visits to see specialists in our quest to try to have children. I do still avoid ever using the words spectrum or Aretha in my talks…

Knowing DeRay was in a hurry, I quickly started the interview. Fortunately, there are no significant blunders to share with you. Andrew, our podcast editor, did what he always does – and gracefully wove together the conversation into a glimpse into just a few of the stories from DeRay’s magnificent book*. I’m so glad to get to share our conversation with this community and hope you will take a listen if you haven’t already. DeRay's assertion that we “can't fight for people [we] don't know,” is another reminder of the importance of understanding the context in which our students enter their educational experiences.

Another Source for Pursuing Equity

Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo (AUC), shared on Twitter this week about another source for pursuing greater equity in our teaching.

Maha and her collaborators (Catherine Cronin and Mia Zamora) have welcomed their respective students and the world into their course entitled:

Equity Unbound: Making Borders Meaningless

They describe Equity Unbound as:

“…an emergent, collaborative curriculum which aims to create equity-focused, open, connected, intercultural learning experiences across classes, countries and contexts.”

The themes they are exploring include:

• Empathy and bias
• Equity
• Fake news
• Privacy
• Algorithms and data policies
• Digital wellbeing

Even if you don’t have time to participate, I highly suggest browsing the overview of each theme and check out the site resources.

As DeRay asserted in the interview I had with him, gaining knowledge about an issue is just the beginning. Whether it is reading On the Other Side of Freedom, or diving into some of the topics explored on Equity Unbound, I look forward to hearing what you are doing to take those next steps into action.

It has been a whirlwind of a month. I have some exciting updates to share with you, along with a few useful tools.

New Role

My role at my institution is being expanded in the coming academic year. The person who I have reported to this past couple of years has been named as our interim provost. Given the immense amount of respect I have for him, I welcomed the conversations about potentially taking on his prior role and continuing to report to him, at least until such time as a longer-term decision on the provost role gets filled.

I now have three titles. I’m not sure that they will fit on the business cards, but they do need to at least need to remain in place, particularly because one of them fulfills some of our obligations articulated in our Title V grant.

• Director of the Institute for Faculty Development
• Director of Teaching Excellence and Digital Pedagogy
• Associate Professor of Business and Management

It all became official on 8/15/18.

Things have been pretty nutty ever since. This past week, we had our new faculty orientation, adjunct training, and our resident faculty gathering. That, plus we welcomed 85 new business students into our department. I was responsible for leading that event, since the person who normally would have facilitated it was with our undeclared majors.

My kids loved the opportunity to visit campus all day on Saturday – and the new students enjoyed watching them take pictures of me with their iPads, as I was presenting. Let’s just say there was an over-emphasis on the nostrils.

New Advice Column

Another exciting thing that happened is that EdSurge invited me to become a columnist for them. Through conversation, we landed on me writing a monthly advice column for people who have questions about teaching within a higher education context.

You can learn more about the column and how to submit a question on the EdSurge website. I have enjoyed seeing the first handful of questions come in and the kinds of things we all tend to struggle with at one time or another.

New Tools

It wouldn’t be back to school season if we didn’t get our hands on at least a few new tools.

• S3STAT – As most of you are aware, we have been plugging away at getting the transcripts up for each episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. We are 67% of the way through them, with each episode after 200 being transcribed as it was published. The transcripts are being hosted on Amazon’s S3 service. I am able to get analytics of the data using S3STAT, which translates the S3 data into “human readable statistics, reports and graphs.” If you use Cloudfront or Amazon S3, check out S3STAT for all your analytics needs: beautiful reports, simple setup, serious visibility.

• Robert Talbert’s GTD posts – I am a huge believer in the power of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. So much so that the course I’m teaching this Fall uses it as one of our two textbooks… Robert Talbert provides an overview of the GTD system and how he uses it in an academic context on his blog. Many of his 14 GTD posts also include videos, so you can see GTD in action in Robert’s life.

• Timing App – I also started using the Timing App again (Mac). It tracks what I do on the computer and helps me identify and analyze how I am using my time. It is a great application, though I did forget to quit it before presenting in front of our full faculty and it started pestering me to tell it what I had been doing the last hour. I need to remember to add Timing to the AppleScript that I was able to set up for when I start/end presentations, thanks to the wonderful Work Smart and Be Remarkable: Productivity in Academia Blog by Helmut Hauser.

I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed at the moment, but also have enough of a sound mind to know that naps are a healthy way of keeping one's perspective. I completed my weekly review today and know that my most important priority in the next few weeks is related to hiring an administrative assistant to support our Institute for Faculty Development.

I also have a couple more columns I am drafting for the new EdSurge column,  along with a Personal Leadership and Productivity class to kick off tomorrow. If you haven't kicked off your class yet, this Faculty Focus article about Opening Intentions is well worth a read.

Your Turn

What new resource have you discovered lately?

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.

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.

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.

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.

As I mentioned on episode #210 with James Lang, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy reading Teaching the Literature Survey Course as much as I was some of the other books in the West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series. Teaching the Literature Survey Course was thought of  as “eating my veggies” and as part of my obligation as part of West Virginia University Press' overall sponsorship of the Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts project.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Teaching the Literature Survey Course addresses two key challenges, which are often characteristics of general survey courses:

• “Too much” to adequately “cover” in a single course
• Lack of opportunities for deeper learning

In each of the classes I've taught in my career, I can’t ever recall a time when I didn’t feel at least some tension around wishing I could “cover” more. At the same time, my greatest desire in my teaching is that students would experience learning that would stay with them for the long haul and would be of great relevance in their lives.

If you also find yourself feeling like you have too much to cover in a given class, or you want to find ways to have your students experience deeper learning, it is worth picking up a copy of:

Teaching the Literature Survey Course, Edited by Gwynn Dujardin, James M. Lang, and John A. Staunton

While the examples they provide are specific to literature classes, they are wide-ranging enough to have it be likely that you might find inspiration for teaching in a different discipline.

Leveraging Maps in Your Teaching

One area that really inspired me was involving using maps in our teaching. This is an approach I have never experimented with before, but have found myself regularly thinking about since I read Teaching the Literature Survey Course.

Two related tools that I regularly see people reference when talking about using maps in their teaching are Google Maps and Google Earth. I was confused about the difference between them, but found this explanation on Quora that cleared it up for me:

“Google Maps contains all of the navigation, lightweight mapping power and points of interest with just a small hint of satellite imagery, while Google Earth has complete 3D satellite data and just a small subset of information on places, without any point-to-point navigation.”

Todd Gardiner described them as related products. He advised that we think of them as a suite of products, like we would Microsoft Office.

Within that suite of products is Tour Builder (a Google Earth experiment), where you can “put your story on the map.” Instead of only seeing a map that was composed by others, we can add to an existing map points of interest, the way we might give someone a tour of our neighborhood. Google suggests that you:

“See how people are using Tour Builder on the site – From a nonprofit documenting its global missions, to a teacher transforming American history.”

While maps might at first seem primarily useful to those who teach history or other social sciences, Tom Barrett decided to use Google Maps to teach math. While his example comes from K-12, it provides us with enough inspiration to get us started thinking…

If you do teach history, there are plenty of sites that are great examples of ways to leverage Google maps in your teaching. Other disciplines will find inspiration on how to: “Pin point a book’s setting, use detective skills, measure distances” and more from Jessica Sanders. The Google Earth example categories are: history, science, space science, math, and geography, yet Teaching the Literature Survey Course is a perfect illustration of how to extend beyond those disciplines and into literature.

Doing something for one of my classes at this exact moment feels out of reach for me, until I become more familiar with the tools and what’s possible. However, I was thinking that I could start small and tackle the sixth suggestion from The Thinking Stick and to:

Create a Map for My Community

They gave an example of creating a map for friends who were visiting China with their favorite restaurants, places to visit, etc.

I could see making one for our local community and getting some practice with the tools. My colleague studies homeless populations and I imagine that maps like this could be very useful for his research (even if it started solely as a means for delegating the student researcher observations).

Even book publishers are starting to make use of Google maps in their creations. We ordered The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home from Wonderbly for our son a couple of years ago. When he gets to the pages of the book that mean that he’s almost home, it is a picture of our neighborhood that is shown from Google maps. The book is customized much more than just the maps, but also throughout the book.

But Wait, There’s More

It is hard for me to stop writing at this point, because I have so many more notes I am reflecting back on after having read Teaching the Literature Survey Course. I started to think to myself that I should write ten posts about some of my take-aways, but then I thought I was getting a little ahead of myself with all of that.

Part of our work as educators is discovering new possibilities. But, there’s also the important step of beginning to experiment and increasing our tolerance for (or perhaps even delight with):

Not Yet-ness

As Amy Collier said all the way back on episode #70:

“When you embrace not yet-ness, you are creating space for things to continue to evolve.” – Amy Collier

Thank you to the editors and authors of Teaching the Literature Survey Course. You have given us so many ways to embrace not yet-ness in our teaching and contribute to deeper learning for our students. 

I recently have had the opportunity to revisit my reading of Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion.

The book is part of a series of books:

Teaching and Learning in Higher Education book series from West Virginia University Press, edited by James M. Lang

West Virginia University Press has sponsored the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast transcripts project. As a result, I get the honor of interviewing the series’ authors and the chance to read their books.

Sarah’s book is the first in the series and has much to say about how we can better facilitate learning for our students by considering the element of emotions. In this post, I share some of the ways that her book has stayed with me since reading it more than a year ago. Here are just a couple of practices that are still with me after my first read of The Spark of Learning.

Generate Curiosity

“When you burn to know what comes next, you are feeling curious” (Cavanagh, 2016, p. 121).

Dave (my husband) shared on a prior episode about his chemistry teacher who ended class on the first day by taking the lit candle that had been sitting on his desk, putting it in his mouth, and proceeding to swallow it.

You can bet that the class was wondering what was going to happen next for the rest of the semester. No, we don’t have to put our lives at stake by attempting the eating of a candle in our particular discipline. But, we can work to find ways to create a healthy tension between students’ current knowledge and what might be possible with further learning.

This might be something as simple as a puzzle, an activity more resembling a mystery, or even introducing a debate that explores two different viewpoints or options.

Encourage Mindfulness

We got to hear about some of Sarah’s and her colleagues’ forthcoming research on the effects of teaching students about mindfulness on episode #204. In The Spark of Learning, she reminds us of the detrimental impact of test anxiety and how the practice of transparency can assist our students in reducing stress and enhancing learning.

Sarah describes Brunye’s research on how learners with math anxiety experienced more of a sense of calm and better results on a math exam when engaging in breathing exercises as compared to other variables.

I’ve been finding big benefits when following a simple mindfulness practice introduced by Asao B. Inoue on episode #209 (airs 6/14/18). I’ll let you hear about it straight from him, but I hope this mention of it causes you to listen extra careful to episode 209’s recommendations segment.

Your Turn

What ways are you discovering to leverage The Spark of Learning in your pedagogy?

I have spent most of my week in Louisiana. My primary objective was to facilitate two workshops for Louisiana State University’s Communication Across the Curriculum Summer Institute (#CxCsi). However, I also was able to attend the event as a participant. What a learning opportunity and a wonderful community…

Workshops

My hosts were interested in me sharing in two areas. First, they wanted me to talk about the ever elusive work-life balance. Finally, they asked me to share about educational technologies that support communication across the curriculum.

In this post, I’ll share some resources from my two workshops. I will also give some glimpses into some of my take-aways from the CxC summer institute.

Tips & Tricks

Balancing the work-life load as a teaching professor

You can view my slides from the workshop and also the responses from participants during the session on my CxC Summer Institute workshop resources page.

On part of the experience I really appreciated was how transparent some people were about their struggles and successes. I asked participants how well they would rate their own work-life balance and received responses that almost approximated a bell curve.

I encourage you to visit the section of the resources page for that session to see the ideas that people had around how we can: capture the commitments we have made, plan for how to execute on those plans, surrender to those inevitable times when things won’t go as we had planned, and how to unite with our partners in our lives when we need help.

My favorite part of this session came as a response to the question: What advice do you have about uniting?

Earlier in the session, I had shared about a poet that Maha Bali had recommended on episode 200. She suggested that we read the poems of Najwa Zebian, who also regularly shares her wisdom on Twitter.

I had a screenshot of her Twitter profile on the slide, including her words:

“These mountains that you are carrying, you were only meant to climb.”

One of the participant’s response to the question: What advice do you have about uniting didn’t miss a beat:

“These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to admire from a distance.”

Did I mention that this is a terrific group of people? As of the time of me composing this blog post, we are still trying to discern who the witty poet among us is… 

Tech Tools for Teaching:

Communicating to Learn, Learning to Communicate

One of the areas of emphasis in the institute is that there are activities we can have our students do that will help them learn through their communication efforts (communicating to learn) and there are activities we can have our students do to demonstrate their learning through their communication (learning to communicate).

In the Tech Tools for Teaching session, I shared more tools that provide students with a means for demonstrating their learning, though many of them could be used on either end of the continuum.

The participants' ideas for tools to help support students’ learning in spoken, written, technological, and visual communication are included on the Tech Tools for Teaching section of the CxCsi resources page.

Other CxCsi Fun

I really enjoyed the opportunities to engage with people one-on-one during the institute the most. The planning team for the event put forth such great effort in making our learning environment comfortable and welcoming.

A few times a day, they did a raffle and gave away some of my favorite teaching and learning books and some that I wasn’t familiar with before attending.

A few books I was excited would be getting in the hands of these faculty included:

• Stephen Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher
• Robert Talbert’s Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty
• Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do

A couple of books that I hadn’t heard of before the conference and am now interested in reading include:

• John C. Bean’s Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom
• Megan Poore’s Using Social Media in the Classroom: A Best Practice Guide

I have had a wonderful trip and am grateful for the opportunity to facilitate these workshop for LSU's CxC Summer Institute. I am also thankful for such fantastic hosts and getting to be a part of this community.

On the way out to Louisiana, I watched The King's Speech for the first time. If you haven't seen this movie, I highly recommend it. On the way home, I will probably try to restrict myself to reading, as I am a bit behind on the books I'm working on finishing.

My mind is mush. But for all good reasons.

Your Turn

Have you watched any good movies recently? Anything good you're reading? I look forward to hearing from you and adding to my list of things to watch/read. 

Three things changed recently that seemed worth telling you about. In this post, I share about Todays Meet closing down, my hesitation to recommend Airmail anymore, and a bit about the Teaching in Higher Ed website redesign. 

Todays Meet Shut Down

Occasionally, I find one of my blog posts getting out of date sooner than I had hoped. About a day after I finished writing about open-ended poll questions, I saw a post by Richard Byrne announcing that Todays Meet is shutting down. Each time Stephen Brookfield has come on the podcast, he has mentioned his use of Todays Meet, whether that is to: 

• Give introverts a chance to engage more in his classes
• Avoid various types of bias
• Afford students the opportunity to pose anonymous responses
• Bring in a fictional character that is Stephen's alter-ego

Fortunately, Richard Byrne provided some alternatives that we can use, if we want to have a backchannel in our teaching: 

TodaysMeet Is Shutting Down – Six Alternatives to Try

I don't typically use a dedicated backchannel tool in my teaching, opting instead to use a polling service (like PollEverywhere) that has a backchannel as just many of the ways to engage. I also make use of presentation tools (like Glisser) to present slides, engage with polls, and use Twitter as a backchannel from within their web app. 

I Stopped Recommending Airmail

In episode #201 on Frictionless Systems, I recommended Airmail as an alternative email client on the Mac. I suppose to be more specific, I recommended that people look into what's available as an alternate to the standard email client on their computers and then mentioned that I had been using Airmail. 

I had too many problems with emails that I would delete in Airmail that then would immediately come back into the inbox. I thought it was just me, but then I saw on the Mac Power Users Facebook group that others were experiencing the same issue. I decided to go back to the built in email client on the Mac. However, quite a few people on the Mac Power Users group said that they have had none of those same issues with Airmail using an application called Postbox. 

I haven't had the opportunity to try Postbox just yet, as I'm wrapping up my doctoral class today and just had all the graduation-related events for my undergraduates this week. It's like my new toy, waiting on my desktop for me to have some time to play with it. I absolutely miss being able to read, reply to, and move emails without ever having my fingers leave the keyboard. Hopefully I will have more to report on future episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed. 

The Teaching in Higher Ed Website Redesign Rolled Out

The website redesign went live in April. The goal had been to have a home for the new episode transcripts, but it turned into much more than that. Some parts of the site you may want to visit include: 

• Recommendations engine, where you can browse past recommendations by type
• Redesigned home page, with information about my forthcoming book, curated content by topic, what podcast listeners are saying, and featured podcast episodes
• Browse past podcast episodes by broad theme, specific topics, or by guest name
• Episodes with transcripts include an option to read on-screen, or download a PDF

We are working on completing all the transcripts from the first 200 episodes and then keeping up-to-date from there. Thanks, once again, to the West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning in Higher Education book series (edited by James M. Lang) for the financial support to get those first 200 transcripts produced. 

Your Turn

What's new with you?

There’s a lot on the horizon for Teaching in Higher Ed.

Episode 200

Episode #200 airs on 04/12/18 with Maha Bali, Robin DeRosa, and Mike Truong sharing what they have changed their mind about regarding their teaching in recent years. I am thankful to each of them for telling such powerful stories.

Transcripts

We are busily producing transcripts for the first 200 episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed to coincide with that milestone. What started as a small update to the Teaching in Higher Ed website to accommodate transcripts has turned into a much-expanded project (as often happens during such seasons).

Our web developer, Anchor Design, is amazing and I can’t wait for you to see what they have come up with for the site.

To give you a taste of what's in store, here are a couple of episode transcripts:

• Episode #92 with James M. Lang on Small Teaching
• Episode #98 with Stephen Brookfield on The Skillful Teacher

Gratitude abounds around here for the financial contribution made by the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education book series from West Virginia University Press: Edited by James M. Lang to support the first 200 episodes’ transcripts.

Recommendations

If you have been listening to the show for a while, you know that each episode ends with the recommendations segment. We each recommend something that has had our attention in recent weeks. A book, a movie, an app, or even just some advice.

The site redesign will have a browsable view of all the past recommendations, to make it easier to go back and discover resources that were provided in past episodes.

The Productive Online Professor

My first book is coming out in September, which I am really excited about. Robert Talbert wrote the forward and really captures the essence of the book.

This book by my friend Bonni Stachowiak is a splendid, useful guide for all of us in higher education — especially but not exclusively those who teach online — for getting our acts together and gaining control over our work that makes us fully present and therefore fully trustworthy.

In it, you’ll encounter many big ideas, such as the Getting Things Done or “GTD” system of productivity, which permeates the chapters and whose importance for educators cannot be overstated.

But part of the genius of this book is that while the big ideas are clearly and coherently laid out, they are also broken down into simple, practical, incremental steps that anyone can take, today. (If you are one of those people with hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox and despair of ever regaining control, you are in for a game-changing experience.)

Then, you can use the book as a field manual — perhaps using some of the numerous digital and analog tools for productivity that the book details — to make those small steps habitual and aggregate more good habits as you journey towards being a truly productive, fully present professor.”

The Productive Online Professor book flyer has a discount code for 20% off,  if you preorder through the Stylus Publishing website before August 30, 2018.

Canvas LMS Conference

I’m excited that my institution is once again providing me with financial support to be able to attend Instructure’s Annual conference July 24-27, 2018. Most of their focus is on Canvas (their LMS), but with the addition of Arc Media and other products, there are always a few other resources to explore while you’re there.

If you are planning on being in Keystone Colorado for the conference, let me know and let’s see if we can find a time to connect.

Your Turn

What’s on the horizon for you in the next few months?

I'm reading a book for an upcoming episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast that has me reflecting on the choices I make in my pedagogy, particularly with regards to assessment.

The College Classroom Assessment Compendium: A Practical Guide to the College Instructor’s Daily Assessment Life, by Jay Parkes and Dawn Zimmaro

It's written from a highly prescriptive perspective. Each section starts out with the authors' recommendation regarding various aspects of assessment.

• Should we give points for attendance?
• Is extra credit a good practice?
• Should late assignments be accepted?

Reflecting on Needed Changes

I have found myself agreeing with about 90% of their recommendations and wrestling with about 10% of their proposals. Each time I find myself mentally debating with them, I am able to revisit the rationale they give for their advice. Then, I discover that I am either more aligned with what they suggested than I originally realized, or I admit that I have some work to do in how I approach a given means of assessment.

Resources for Teaching Transformations

I was interviewed for the EdSurge podcast recently about how my teaching has changed since I first started the podcast back in June of 2014. I tried to discipline myself not to be too verbose regarding this particular set of questions. It would have been easier to answer how my teaching hasn't been changed from almost 200 conversations with such phenomenal educators.

I came across a number of articles in recent weeks that encompass a few of those transformational areas in my teaching that I wanted to share with you.

• Open Education Resources Applications from around the world
• Ten Key Points About Active Learning
• Another Terrible Idea from Turn it In
• Literature Review of Teaching

The more I learn about teaching, the more I discover the importance of being adaptable in our practice. Our collective humility is essential for becoming better able to serve our students.

Teaching in Higher Ed Transcripts

Episode 200 is coming in April. I'm excited to share a conversation with fellow educators about what we have changed our minds about regarding our teaching in recent years.

I was going to keep it a surprise until episode 200 airs, but have received such valuable feedback when I shared the news with others that I have decided to start spreading the news. The Teaching in Higher Ed podcast is going to have transcripts of every past episode and the ones going forward.

We are still working out the precise user interface that will be available to access the transcripts, but hope that it will make the podcast more accessible, as well as having it be easier to discover. Here's a couple of transcripts to whet your appetite for what is to come:

• Episode 92 with James Lang
• Episode 98 with Stephen Brookfield.

If you have any input in terms of making the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast transcripts as beneficial for faculty as possible, please get in touch with me.

My husband and I had already begun to invest our own money in this important endeavor. However, when I recently asked for input on the transcripts on the POD Network listserv, we were able to discover an unexpected partner to support us on the financial end of things.

The West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning in Higher Education book series’ editor, James M. Lang, has been a regular guest on Teaching in Higher Ed since the beginning. Jim was on episode 19, episode 92, and episode 146 (with Ken Bain).

Many of the other WVU Press’s Teaching and Learning in Higher Education authors have also been on the podcast in the past. The series is providing financial support to make the first 200 episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed available in transcript form.

As a part of our partnership, other authors will be visiting the podcast throughout the rest of 2018, about once every other month. I am looking forward to making the transcripts available to all of you and to share about the wonderful resources on how to make our teaching more effective with the books in the WVU Press’s Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series.

Discount Code for Preorders of My Forthcoming Book

As I shared recently, my new book is now available for preorder. Use the code TPOP20 to receive a 20% discount at checkout for:

The Productive Online Professor: A Practical Guide

Bonni Stachowiak

Forward by Robert Talbert

Thrive Online Series

I will be doing some type of giveaway to those who preorder using the Stylus website, though I haven't quite figured out what that is going to be just yet.

Let's just say that Katie Linder's Academic Book Promotion Toolkit has given me plenty of ideas and resources to spark my imagination and then some.

As I round out the year in Teaching in Higher Ed podcasting, I am excited to share a few more conversations with you in the coming weeks. The podcast has aired every single week since June of 2014. It invigorates me to consider that in April of 2018, I will air the 200th episode of Teaching in Higher Ed.

The next few weeks have some serious sources of inspiration for me. Robin DeRosa and I talk about open education on episode 183. Pooja Agarwal comes back on the show to share retrieval practice research on episode 184. Finally, we look toward a new year with another visit with Christian Friedrich. He and I talk about privacy and safety in online learning on episode 185, the last week in December.

I am grateful to each of the guests who came on the podcast in 2017 and shared their expertise. If you have yet to visit the episodes page and browse through the taxonomy, it can be a helpful way to revisit older episodes that best meet your needs.

Top 13 Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast Episodes in 2017

Below are the top thirteen downloaded episodes of 2017:

1. e137 – Teaching Naked Techniques with C. Edward Watson
2. e159 – Dynamic Lecturing with Todd Zakrajsek
3. e135 – The Spark of Learning with Sarah Rose Cavanagh
4. e140 – Thinking Outside the LMS with Steven Michels
5. e142 – Rethinking Assessment (and other reflections on the Lilly Conference) with Bonni and Dave Stachowiak
6. e141 – The Danger of Silence with Clint Smith
7. e164 – Setting Students Up for Success from the Start with Joe Hoyle
8. e134 – Teaching Creativity with Hoda Mostafa
9. e144 – Digital Literacy – Then and Now with Bryan Alexander
10. e147 – Racial Identity in the Classroom with Stephen Brookfield
11. e146 – Motivation in the Classroom with James Lang and Ken Bain
12. e136 – Teaching Naked Techniques with Jose Bowen
13. e138 – Yes, Digital Literacy, But Which One with Michael Caulfield

I was probably most challenged by the conversations about race that I had with Clint Smith and Stephen Brookfield. Mike Caulfield inspired me to continue to work to improve my own digital literacy and made me laugh harder than any other guest in 2017 (which is saying a lot).

I aspire to identify even more puzzles for my students to explore, through the modeling provided by Joe Hoyle. James Lang helped me try out a new format for the show. He took over the interviewing role and asked Ken Bain questions throughout the episode, while I sat back and enjoyed listening intently. Each one of these individuals have shaped my teaching in profound ways.

Top 13 Recommended Resources

Some of you have used the referral links I provide in the show notes to the books and other resources recommended by guests. Below are some of the most-purchased items from our Amazon affiliate links in 2017:

1. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, by James Lang
2. Doodling for Academics: A Coloring and Activity Book (Chicago Guides to Academic Life), by Julie Schumacher and Lauren Nassef
3. Slide:logy: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, by Nancy Duarte
4. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen
5. Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation, by Saundra Nancy McGuire
6. Teaching Naked Techniques: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Classes, by Jose Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson
7. The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux, by Cathy N. Davidson
8. The Teaching Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Improved Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions, by Peter Seldin, J. Elizabeth Miller, and Clement A. Seldin
9. Make It Sick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel
10. The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain, by Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek
11. What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain
12. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by John J. Ratey
13. There Is No Good Card for This: What To Say and Do When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love, by Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell

It may be worth noting that when you use an affiliate link, if you purchase other items during that visit to Amazon, we often receive some kind of commission. That must explain why the Audible recording of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F-ck” wound up showing up on our affiliates links. Someone will have to tell me more about this one at some point…

Many of you also continued to enjoy Julie Schumacher’s sense of humor. Her coloring book landed at #2 (Doodling for Academics), but her novel, Dear Committee Members, was very close to making it on the list, as well. If you haven’t read it yet; it is hysterical.

I suspect that I am not going to become a YouTube sensation. However, my How to Pencast video generated almost 800 views. I won't plan on living off my YouTube advertising fees anytime soon. First off, I don't show advertisements with my videos. Even if I did, I would be a long ways off from any serious income…

Your Turn

What has been a Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode that has transformed your teaching in some way? What has been a favorite recommendation you heard about on Teaching in Higher Ed?

As I mentioned in last week's post about finding good partners, one of my doctoral students posed some intriguing questions to me that I have been carrying with me these past two weeks. In this post, I share more of her specific questions and give my second of several recommendations.

Sharing Online

One of the individuals in the class shared a powerful way in which she was feeling inspired to communicate online. However, she had concerns about some of the dangers of doing this kind of sharing online.

I gave her a few suggestions right away, but suggested that she follow up with me with an email, as there was a lot more I could say on the topics. Her emails have been edited to protect her (and her students’) identity, as well as for context.

The Questions

How do I blog about controversial topics safely online?

For example, I work in an urban school where a lot of teacher abuse from students occur.  How can I create a safe atmosphere for others to discuss these experiences without being judged or shamed by others who don't understand what it is to support students who have been identified as traumatized?

In addition, to the societal view that you must be a “bad” teacher or doing something wrong if you don't have classroom management or positive relationships with others.

I am also interested in developing powerful dialogues and relationships amongst parents and teachers.  A partnership that will create collaboration and supports for students, specifically in the areas of special education, (moderate to serve and emotional/behavioral disorders).  Again, pertaining to parents in urban areas (i.e. uneducated, multiple jobs, single parents, foster parents, grandparents, etc.)”

Sharing Their Stories

One of the most powerful ways you could have an impact is to share the stories of those you are looking to serve. When Clint Smith was on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on episode 141, he shared about the dangers of silence and how important our voices are. He spoke so proudly of his students and their capabilities and capacity.

The Ear Hustle podcast is another tremendous example of sharing context for people who want to learn more about life inside of a prison's walls. An episode that made me laugh was episode six, entitled “The Boom Boom Room,” about conjugal visits. Episode nine made me weep, as they shared about death and dying in the prison.

Jesse Stommel is another person who regularly challenges us to respect our students. As Jesse explains why he no longer grades, he stresses the importance of starting by trusting our students. Even though the main topic of episode 57, when Jesse was a guest, was about Twitter, the thread that went throughout the entire episode was regarding the importance of kindness in our teaching.

On episode #148, Bronwyn Harris shared about her book, Literally Unbelievable. Despite describing incredibly challenging situations, Bronwyn displays a profound respect for her students, their families, and the people who seek to improve such devastating circumstances. The Deeper Learning podcast, produced by the Orange County Department of Education, is another example of powerful storytelling about people making a difference in the educational community.

One of the common characteristics about all the examples of exquisite storytelling is that there is no place for venting about frustrations regarding students. Anger over the difficult environment that they have to navigate? Yes. But, venting about any challenges related directly to the people that they serve is off limits.

An empathetic voice is present throughout all of these wide-ranging stories. The more empathy we can create toward those we are trying to serve, the more we can do the difficult work of coming up with sustainable solutions.

Getting Started

One of the biggest pieces of advice I have for you, as you reflect even more on your digital identity, is to determine who your work will be targeted toward.

Are you creating content to help other teachers have greater empathy for their students? Or, do you want to tell stories and provide resources to help families better navigate their children's educational paths? 

Once you have a narrow focus on who you are going to be talking to, finding stories to share becomes a lot easier.

One of the best resources I have found for storytelling, recently, is the Power Your Podcast with Storytelling course by Alex Blumberg for the CreativeLive site. If you are interested in taking the course, use this link to get $15 off (and I will also get $15 for the referral).

Alex used to be a producer for the This American Life podcast and is one of the most phenomenal storytellers I know. The episode of his StartUp podcast called Shadowed Qualities was one of the most poignant examples of the “stuff” we bring into our work communities I have ever heard.

I am thrilled that you are asking these questions and look forward to seeing where this all heads, as you create more content in the coming weeks on your blog.

On-ramps: Reflections on the 14th Annual Open Education Conference

At last week's OpenEd17 conference, Jim Luke introduced the idea of having on-ramps for faculty to get on board with open education initiatives at our various institutions.

Ever since then, I have been captivated by the analogy of on-ramps as a means of supporting learners.

• In what ways did people provide me with ways to take my learning further regarding open education at OpenEd17?
• What have I discovered as a better means for introducing students to new ideas in my teaching?
• How do we address learners that are already speeding down a domain of knowledge's highway and have different needs to enhance their own learning than beginners do?

It seems like too daunting a task to attempt to give an overview of everything I discovered at OpenEd17. Instead, I will highlight a few key findings here, and assure you that my list of future potential podcast guests is larger than ever.

Start Somewhere

The first morning of the conference, we got to hear from a panel of students from Santa Ana College. They were articulate and celebrated what having open educational resources (OARs) in their courses has meant for them.

One of the panelists stressed that if faculty expect stellar assignments from their students, we should expect the same quality of work from ourselves. The overall message at this point in panel was that we should “just do it,” and start somewhere with our open education efforts.

Open Textbooks

I have been sharing recently that I'm embarking with my doctoral students on our first-ever open textbook endeavor. We are very early in the process (class just started last Saturday), but are all completely jazzed about what's possible.

Robin DeRosa's blog post on her open textbook efforts has been incredibly helpful to me, in considering how to get started. I decided to use Pressbooks for the composition and eventual distribution of the open textbook we will be writing.

Pressbooks is built on the popular blogging platform, WordPress. I am already familiar with WordPress, since that's what the Teaching in Higher Ed website uses. I was able to attend a session about the roadmap for future iterations of Pressbooks. They appear to be quite an innovative company and I'm excited to see what we are able to produce, using their service.

Mike Caulfield has published an open textbook using Pressbooks. His Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers is an excellent source for helping to grow information literacy.

You can view Mike's presentation about the Digital Polarization Project online, thanks to Robin's filming efforts at OpenEd17. He also made his slides available online.

That's just the beginning of what's available through open textbooks. The Ohio State University Library has a great list of ways in which to search for books, using different websites.

Using already-available open textbooks is just the beginning of what's possible in open education. Many presenters stressed how faculty enjoy the ability to customize open textbooks to best meet their needs.

We were also encouraged to not replace one passive tool (a traditional textbook) with another passive tool (an open textbook). There are many ways in which we can make open educational resources engaging and active.

Keep Going

One way I am getting started is through OpenTextbooks. But, that is just the beginning, I know.

The OER (open educational resources) World Map is brimming with possibilities of where to possibly head next.

I hope to find colleagues at my institution who are ready to begin exploring how we might better serve our students through open education, even if it means starting in the smallest of ways.

Ken Bauer describes well the failures we will experience if we try to introduce too many new tools to faculty too quickly. He also shares questions he has, after attending OpenEd17, himself.

If you want to get more of a taste of what happened at OpenEd17, here's an OER video Digest that shares much more than what I have in this post.

Gratitude

I am thankful for all the people who gave so generously at OpenEd17. It was wonderful to get to meet some friends in person for the first time, while reuniting with other friends I haven't seen in a long while.

It all reminded me of some of the writing that Maha Bali did, after she met some friends in person for the first time at OER17.  The experience is difficult to describe. I will treasure the opportunities to be in-person with such magnificent and inspiring educators and appreciate that we have such wonderful ways to stay in touch.

My vote on the top 100 tools for learning

Jane Hart is conducting her annual survey of Top 100 Tools for Learning. The following are my top ten tools for learning, categorizes under Jane Hart's structure of: education, personal and professional learning, and workplace learning. You can also check out my 2016 votes, many of which carried across into this year.

Another related post worth checking out is Harold Jarche's Top Tools 2017. I'm glad (sort of ) that I made my list first. Otherwise, I definitely would have been influenced by his mentions of: Slack, 1Password (absolutely essential), and WordPress.

Education

Zoom – There's something that happens in communication when you can see another person and hear the sound of their voice. Zoom makes one-on-one conversations rich, not to mention entire classes. People can get set up simply and start connecting right away. I especially enjoy their breakout rooms feature, which is easy to use and gives the ability to have people discuss topics in smaller groups.

PollEverywhere – I'm a big believer in using retrieval tactics to strengthen student learning. PollEverywhere allows me to pose various types of questions to learners and have complete control over whether their results are displayed and when. Learners can give their answers to the questions that are posed via their smart phones, tablets, computers, or even via Twitter. Quizlet is another good tool for retrieval practice, especially Quizlet Live.

Glisser – I only just recently started using Glisser, but am really appreciating its ease of use and way to engage learners. It allows us to present slides, use polls, show videos, have students ask questions, allow people to tweet out slides from our slide deck, and more.

Canvas – Our university switched to the Canvas LMS just over a year ago and I'm still a big fan. I do believe in still thinking outside the LMS, though I appreciate the opportunity for grades and feedback to have a confidential, two-way place to occur.

Personal and professional learning

iTunes (podcasts)  – Learning never has to end with podcasts. They are like shows on the radio, but without having to be listening at the exact time the show airs. I listen to podcasts daily, using an app called Overcast, which accesses the iTunes podcast feed for the various shows I like to listen to… I can pretty much never keep up with all the wonderful resources that are out there in the form of podcasts, but it is fun to continually try.

Twitter – My personal learning network (PLN) completely changed when I started using Twitter regularly. Twitter is a social network that's value comes forth when you connect with “people who are like you – and also people who are not like you” (Peter Newbury on Teaching in Higher Ed).

Feedly – I still have fond memories of walking to a nearby bagel shop and reading the newspaper in my 20s. Now that I'm in my 40s, we have far superior newspapers. We can read them on our various devices and customize them to our exact preferences. Using Feedly, I can subscribe to the blogs and news sources that I want and have Feedly keep track of which stories I've read, already, and which ones are still unread. When I stop finding value in a particular source, I just unsubscribe on Feedly and can further increase the value of my virtual newspaper.

Pinboard – I can send articles that I want to bookmark (save for reference) from my preferred newsreader over to Pinboard.in, without having to leave the app. I have bookmarks saved on edtech,  open textbooks, productivity, blended learning, humor, parenting, and hundreds of other topics.

Workplace learning

Clarify – Another thing I did in my 20s (but this activity was a lot less fun than walks to the bagel shop) was make documentation. If you ever find yourself needing to build a how-to manual, Clarify will make this process incredibly easy for you. You just walk through the steps it takes to perform a function and have Clarify take screenshots along the way. You can add instructions and arrows/steps/annotations on your screenshots. When you're done, there are a myriad of export options, which can be customized so you get your documentation just the way you want it.

SnagIt – I've never been as concise as I would like to be, but SnagIt helps me move closer to that goal. When someone asks me a question, I can just take a screenshot (a picture of what's on my screen) and draw arrows and add text to give the answer in the proper context. I can also “video” what's on my screen (screencast), whether for the purpose of answering a question, or giving feedback on an assignment.

What tools have you found to be especially helpful in facilitating learning, or in contributing to your own personal and professional development? Comment below, or consider submitting your own vote for the 2017 top 100 tools list. 

I've written previously about the great laptop ban debate. Now seems as good a time as any to embark on yet another controversial topic:

Digital reading

Naomi Baron in The New Republic argues that digital reading is no substitute for the printed word. A couple paragraphs in, she does indicate that there's no simple answer to whether or not we learn better when reading in a digital format versus tangible books, however.

Why I Primarily Read Digitally

While I am among those who love the smell and feel of books, I still wind up doing most of my reading in digital form. Here are some reasons why:

Portability

Almost all my reading is done on my 10.5″ iPad Pro. It goes with me everywhere. To work, when I arrive a few minutes early to pick our kids up from school, to a doctor's appointment, and even to bed.

Night mode

I read at least an hour per night. Most apps have a setting that makes the background black and the text white. The Kindle app lets me adjust the brightness of the white text such that it emits as little light as possible.

Saving highlights and notes

It is as easy to highlight something in my Kindle app, as dragging my finger across the words I want to highlight. All highlights and notes are all then kept in a single place, making them that much easier to reference in the future. Highlights in physical books aren't at all easy to leverage, after I finishing reading something and put the book away on a shelf.

The Amazon Kindle site for storing all our highlights and notes recently went through a welcomed overhaul. The old system regularly confounded me. This one makes it easy to view my various Kindle books on the left, see my highlights and notes on the right, and search for books I've previously read.

Motivation

I use a service called Goodreads to track the books I've read and see what others I'm connected with in the community are reading. Goodreads invites me to set a reading challenge each year. Tracking my progress has definitely urged me to read more books than I otherwise might have in prior years.

To date, I have read 16 of my planned 20 books for 2017. I should easily be able to achieve my goal by the end of the year. I may even set my sights on reading 24 books in 2018.

Flexibility

Some publications, such as The Atlantic, are now even making their articles available as spoken word audio files. I was able to listen to this powerful pieceby Ta-Nehisi Coates the other night, while getting ready for bed. I did miss hearing Ta-Nehisi's own inflection in his words, but the audio feature still afforded me more flexibility in how to consume his writing.

Dave does the majority of his reading in the form of listening to audio books. I might do the same, if I didn't have so many podcasts to try (and fail) to keep up with… Dave especially likes when he owns the audio and the digital copy of a book, as it syncs his reading progress within the two formats.

Cautionary Notes

It isn't all unicorns and rainbows with digital reading, however. There are some potential downsides, if we aren't careful.

Distractions

The number one downside to digital reading for me is the potential for distractions. As I have been writing this blog post, I've encountered:

• A hedgehog, wearing slippers, being tickled
• Polarizing movie reviews for the movie An Inconvenient Sequel, which I sent to a friend who teaches statistics
• 7 tips to improve your Instagram feed, because I keep thinking I'll get a workflow figured out to improve the Teaching in Higher Ed Instagram account one of these days

I wish more of my reading time was devoted to books and long form pieces (though not everyone appreciates that vernacular). It's easy to get lost in mindless skimming of my RSS feeds in Unread, versus having the discipline to stay focused on a book for an hour.

To be fair to myself, I'm under the weather. I'm grateful to have accomplished anything this morning. A few breaks from writing next week's blog post isn't the end of the world. I love being able to consume and compose content, while lying on my side, next to a giant box of Kleenex and cough drops.

I am at my most productive at reading when I use my Kindle e-reader, instead of the Kindle app on my iPad. My book completion rates go through the roof when I don't have digital distractions only a couple of taps away.

Inability to Give Books Away

While it is possible for me to loan my Kindle books to a friend for 14 days, it isn't something I do very often. With physical books, I can gift them to a friend or our local library, after I'm done reading them.

Digital Reading Workflow

Most of my daily reading involves consuming content from RSS feeds and Twitter. After that, there's usually at least another 15-30 minutes I'll still be awake enough to make progress on whatever book I'm reading.

RSS Feed Manager

Feedly is the service I use to manage all the content (RSS feeds) that I want to subscribe to… Each time a new article gets posted on a site I subscribe to, it gets “fed” into Feedly as an unread post. I can easily add new content sources (“feeds”) into Feedly and have a one-stop place to go for the most relevant content to me.

When I have read an article, it won't show up in my unread items any longer. That is the case whether I read it on my phone, my iPad, or on my computer. The information about what I have already read goes with me, wherever I happen to be consuming content.

Dave is a fan of Feedbin. He recently mentioned in the Teaching in Higher Ed Slack group that one of the features he likes is the way they let you subscribe to email newsletters inside of Feedbin.

Unread

While Feedly and Feedbin take care of tracking/subscribing to all my feeds, Unread is the app I use to actually read them. It is a paid app, but worth every penny.

It did take awhile to get used to how to navigate Unread. It was an excellent use of time, however. Since I do so much reading while lying on my side (I had no idea this post was going to get so personal), I love that I can swipe from anywhere on the screen to navigate the various parts of the interface.

I can save articles I read in Unread to Pinboard (my preferred bookmarking service). At the same time, I can include tags, to make it that much easier to find what I'm looking for down the road.

Kindle App

Even though I know I would read more if I stuck to only using my Kindle e-reader, I still do most of my reading on the free Kindle app.

I can use dark mode when I'm reading at night, highlight passages, and look up a word in the dictionary (right inside the app). I can Tweet a quote from the book, while in the middle of reading, as well as see approximately how many more minutes it will take until I will finish the chapter I am reading.

Your Turn

What's your take on digital reading? Are there any tools I left out that you would recommend? How do you address the potential for distraction when you're reading?