Spring break recharge

Bonni [00:00:00] I’ve got a special guest here to introduce the first part of the show would you say hello.

Luke [00:00:06] Hello.

Bonni [00:00:07] This is Luke and Luke. Why don’t you say welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Luke [00:00:17] Hello and welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Bonni [00:00:17] Yeah. And Luke today we’re going to be talking about spring break recharge.

Luke [00:00:24] Ok.

Bonni [00:00:25] OK thanks for joining me for the first part of the show.

Production Credit [00:00:29] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni [00:00:39] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science. Of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni [00:01:05] It’s a beautiful night out here in sunny southern California a beautiful sunset. There are lots of neighborhood children playing outside and I am so ready for Spring Break which starts next week. There are different philosophies about spring break. I’ve noticed from my colleagues and friends at other institutions.

Bonni [00:01:25] Some people have the approach of well we can get ourselves a little break and have our students work on major papers during that time when we can get a lot of grading done and or I suppose we can recharge and refresh to get ready for the rest of the semester.

Bonni [00:01:42] I tend to fall into Camp B and C which would be. I do plan a lot of grading during that time I have a major paper in a class I’m teaching two sections of so I’ll grading 60 to so pretty substantial papers.

Bonni [00:01:57] But who’s counting. And then I also like to do some recharge and refresh. Looking toward finishing strong for the semester and I actually was pretty having a little bit of an overwhelmed week. I have been sending some notes back and forth from my guest back on episode 35.

Bonni [00:02:16] His name is Doug McKee. And he talked about backbend on eliciting and using feedback from students. But he blogs regularly and did start his teach better podcast and I’ve been enjoying listening to those episodes as well and he said hey it’s spring break.

Bonni [00:02:31] Maybe you could just talk a little bit about what you’re planning to and make some recommendations and so since I’m planning on doing a little bit of recharger refreshing for the rest the semester I did have some guidance that I think may be helpful for some people out there.

Bonni [00:02:45] I was talking with one of my colleagues the other night and we were sharing about never wanting to cheat our students out of having them work on meaningful assignments and having them be challenged and having them be as much like the real world as is possible.

Bonni [00:03:02] And at the same time we both were lamenting just how difficult it can be when you embrace that teaching philosophy in terms of wanting to be efficient with how you grade that how you process that how you handle that kind of thing.

Bonni [00:03:15] So you want to have you want to gain some efficiencies but still be really effective with the feedback and the types of assignments you have students do to that end. Here’s some things that you might think about may be considering for future semesters or maybe even taking just one of these ideas over the spring break and putting it in place for the end of your semester.

Bonni [00:03:34] The first category of things is sign ups sign ups can be really inefficient. I when I started I would have group presentations in classes and I’d pass around a piece of paper and sometimes it would never actually make its way back around to me. By the time the class was over.

Bonni [00:03:50] So as far as different kinds of sign ups if I were going to have some kind of a sign up for presentations like that where maybe only three groups could present during a particular session or I only want one student to present etc.

Bonni [00:04:05] The website doodle d o o l e which all have in the show notes at teachinginhighered.com/39 so you don’t have to worry about stopping your walk around the lake to write down that link. At any rate doodle is a great tool I’ve used it for years now and it works great for sign ups for presentations like I said.

Bonni [00:04:26] It also works great if you’re trying to get a group of faculty together with varied schedules so you can put together a list of different possible dates and people can pick and choose which ones will work the best for them.

Bonni [00:04:39] Another similar tool for that is called thebestday.com and it’s kind of the same idea where we put a bunch of different dates together and times together and people can indicate which one of those is going to be the best day for them.

Bonni [00:04:56] But that one I like a little bit because you can actually add other kinds of polls. If you were going to have food for example you could have people vote on the kind of food they wanted to have or if you were going to have locations where you wanted them to get to pick the best location you can do that too.

Bonni [00:05:12] As far as sign ups for office hours I have been using for a couple of years now. A service called Time Trade.

Bonni [00:05:19] This is not a free service. It is a paid service but one that I find to be well worth the investment. And what happens is that I set up different blocks of time on time trade that are essentially my office hours instead of students just coming by my office and seeing if I’m around or available.

Bonni [00:05:40] I like to have them getting prepared for the business world where no you actually set up a meeting with someone and so they can go and see what times are available and I set up a 15 minute block of this something really quick.

Bonni [00:05:51] A 30 minute block a one hour block and also a 1 hour lunch because we have a cafeteria that we can go to and that tends to be a really good way to have those more informal conversations.

Bonni [00:06:05] So I have that on my Web site for my university. The reason I leave it on my website for the university is that I’ve got everything set up to link there.

Bonni [00:06:14] So if in the future I end up finding a better service than time trade I don’t have to go back track a bunch and a lot of syllabi by or in a lot of course shells and reroute that again. It’s on the website and it talks about office hours and it gives them the advice that they should sign up for more time than they think they might need just to make sure that we’re not rushed.

Bonni [00:06:34] And then links that over to the time trade service which works great so once they sign up for a time say they sign up for a half hour block with me then no one else can sign up for that block and it also links with my calendar.

Bonni [00:06:46] So it’ll block that time in my calendar. But let’s say that maybe one of those weeks I had a doctor’s appointment. I don’t have to go into my office hours and undo that because it sinks the other direction too so he would know not to offer that time to students even though it was during that block of typical office hours.

Bonni [00:07:05] Another really great tool that I think a lot of us don’t make enough use of is just the fact that on Google Docs we can create forms on them and they’re really easy to do.

Bonni [00:07:16] In fact there are some articles out there even about how to make quizzes inside of Google but I’d tend to use other tools for that but just creating a google form we’ve mentioned in previous episodes I’m teaching a business ethics class this semester and we’re going to do a business ethics competition at the end of this semester.

Bonni [00:07:33] And so for people who want to participate in that we have our google form that will collect all the information and then we’ll be able to have people’s contact information and know who wants to sign up as far as grading goes I’ve been talking a little bit about grading lately some of you may have seen in the weekly e-mail that I was on the Mac power users show.

Bonni [00:07:53] And I talked a bit about a workflow that I have for screencast and feedback to students so they get to not just see handwritten or typed comments but actually hear my voice and see their paper and see the rubric at the same time as I’m talking about it.

Bonni [00:08:10] But I didn’t want to go into this much detail is just the first 15 minutes of their live show. By the way I put a link to that in the show notes if you haven’t had a chance to listen yet I didn’t go into a lot of detail but I’m very compulsive with my grading workflows.

Bonni [00:08:25] If you were to say well what’s your flow well it would depend on the kind of assignment. What was the work product being produced and what’s the best most effective but also efficient way to get them the feedback that they’re looking for.

Bonni [00:08:40] And one of my go tos is if I’m taking in their work via that turn it in service which we access because we are. Our university uses a learning management system called Moodle. Many of you might have heard of an inside moodle we can just choose a turn it in assignment and they link back and forth between.

Bonni [00:09:01] So the students don’t have to have a separate log in for turn it in dot com. But what I can do is I can go to their iPad app and I can get it set up really easy it’s very intuitive. The directions are very easy to understand and I can have all of their papers all of their assignments plus the grading rubric that I’m going to use on the turn it in iPad app.

Bonni [00:09:24] And I find that to be so much more effective than sitting in front of a computer I tend to get a little bogged down if I sit down in front of a computer for too long. So over spring break I do plan on using that Turnitin iPad app I’m thinking about sitting out on our port. I don’t set up there.

Bonni [00:09:40] And then enjoying some of the fresh air and not sitting in front of my computer for as long as it’ll take me to grade those 62 papers so that turn into an app turn it in iPad app is absolutely worth a look. The one downside which isn’t that much of a downside for me but I know for some of my colleagues if you have a stylus and you want to do hand written feedback to students then the Turnitin app is not going to support that for you.

Bonni [00:10:09] And as far as one last category of items to think about maybe adopting is answering student questions.

Bonni [00:10:17] As I mentioned my students are about to turn in a pretty major paper for the semester and that’s coming up here on Friday by 5:00 p.m. So they are furiously working on it. As you can imagine as far as making the question and answer feedback as efficient and effective as possible I set up a forum inside of each one of my classes.

Bonni [00:10:39] That’s just for questions and answers and I invite students to post their questions there. That way when I get a question from a student it’s highly likely that someone else in the class will have the same question and then we can just be more proactive about reminding them hey this assignment is coming. Here’s some information.

Bonni [00:10:57] It kind of gives them a little bit more of a nudge as we go. Haven’t had a lot of success at getting students to post questions on that Q and A forum. They tend to just email me directly and I realize part of that is I’m shaping behavior because I do take the questions that way but it doesn’t really bother me that much.

Bonni [00:11:14] Sometimes and I can combine three to five of them together and then email them all out in just one email and it does save to many back and forth emails and I do find that students appreciate getting that feedback and I get a lot of responses when I send out those Kootenay emails.

Bonni [00:11:31] Of course a lot of responses are more questions but that’s okay. That’s what we’re here for is to help support the students in success like that. The other thing is I got a question from a student who was struggling with something.

Bonni [00:11:44] And I couldn’t quite picture what she was talking about because it sounded like it looked different on her screen than it does on mine and I find it so helpful to be able to do screenshots and I mentioned previously. I really like the program snag it. It’s made by a company called tech smith.

Bonni [00:12:01] It’s available on the Windows platform and on the Mac platform I’ve been using for I think as long as it’s been around and it just always gets better and then a screenshot is not going to get the job done then I might do a little screencast and screencast is like a movie of what’s on your screen.

Bonni [00:12:19] I’ve mentioned previously that tapes app is a great one on your Mac. It’s got a time limit but that’s OK. These should just be quick little feedback to the students and answering their questions and the other thing you want to be aware with tapes app is it’s a 60 minute monthly limit and I have regularly hit that limit.

Bonni [00:12:39] If I’m using it for grading so I also like to use negat because it will do short screen casts too so I like to use it for that. If you want more extensive screencast maybe where you’re going to set up some kind of process where you want this to be getting students started on a major assignment.

Bonni [00:12:57] You might look into a program on the Mac screen flow or on the Mac or PC. Camtasia, also made by Tech Smith the makers of negat the screencast like that can get a lot more sophisticated where you could have picture in pictures so you might they might see your face describing something and also see what’s on your screen. And those are really good resources to have in your toolkit too.

Bonni [00:13:21] How about you what are you doing over spring break. What’s your philosophy. Do you just shut down and really relax. I would love to hear from you to see what books you’re going to be reading or movies or music or television shows you’ll be catching up on or are you more a little bit more like me are you going to be doing lots of grading.

Bonni [00:13:41] Do you have any suggestions for making that process more effective or any essentially spring cleaning for your processes around your workflows for grading or scheduling or anything.

Bonni [00:13:53] I didn’t talk about today if you would consider leaving the message at 949-38-learn I’d love to see if we could get some recommendations from you out there again whether or not it’s just a good movie you plan on watching or what your philosophy is about spring break or any recommendations that you might have.

Bonni [00:14:15] Speaking of recommendations this is the point in the show where I recommend some to him. Dave my husband who’s been on prior shows he actually mentioned this during the last show but you can tell I’m still getting a lot out of it. He bought me for Valentine’s Day slash my recovering from foot surgery present was the Kindle Voyage.

Bonni [00:14:37] You might know there’s a lot of different Kindles out there. Everything from a Kindle Fire that works very similarly to an iPad where you can get movies and TV and social media etc. all the way down to the Kindles that are just readers. And that seems like a bad thing but it’s actually a really really good thing.

Bonni [00:14:56] I have I use the service called Good Reads and I’ve found that we are now in the month of March and I’m about to hit my yearly reading goal in the month of March just because I went on a trip to teach a class up to Stockton a couple of weeks ago.

Bonni [00:15:13] And that really got me reading and then at night now I’m just leaving the iPad to the side because it’s too distracting for me it makes my mind spin a little bit too much and I just find the reading so enjoyable so I’d recommend a few are kind of thinking about wanting to up your reading maybe considering going to a really simple reader again.

Bonni [00:15:32] And there’s lots of options out there and I think the Kindle Voyage is a nice one. But they have even less expensive options like that that might be good to do.

Bonni [00:15:39] Thanks for listening and again I’d really love it if you’d consider leaving a voicemail at 949-38-learn. Let me know how spring breaks going and we’ll kind of share that together in the next episode. And I do thank you so much for listening and for being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community.

Bonni [00:15:59] If you would like to give any feedback on the show you can do that at teachinginhighered.com/feedback or if you want to give feedback about this episode specifically teachinginhighered.com/39. There’s a section for comments down there.

Bonni [00:16:17] I would greatly appreciate if you would consider asking someone else to listen to the show. Who might not have heard of it before and starting to participate. Loving and seeing the comments coming in and getting to hear from many of you over email.

Bonni [00:16:30] It’s such a joy to get to talk to other people who have a passion for becoming more effective at facilitating learning. Thanks for listening and I’m looking forward to hopefully getting some voicemails of what’s going on for your spring break.

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