March? Really?
Tuesday afternoon I met with Mags and Laurie to talk about Work/PD planning. It’s helpful to talk through what other people are doing to get my own in order. Had a good chat with Liesel about what is PD planning vs. what’s just work? I think I got stuck trying to put things in a grid and my ID mind wanted to make the content fit the boxes but conceptual mind had other ideas. Either way my mind works there hasn’t been a lot of spare time to put in more detail. Now that I’ve seen the other plan styles and got some context, I think I can come up with something that works for me. I did a similar thing with some financial planning the other day – spreadsheet to notepad, to Word doc… so out of a grid and into another sort of grid by a circular route.
Tuesday I also learned how to set up BlueJeans accounts and sent out my first welcome letter. I think I have a handle on the account creation but I’ll have to do it a few times. I also need to practice with scheduling meetings. It’s pretty straightforward but I had a moment where I wondered if I scheduled a specific time, would I (and participants) be able to access the room before that time. I’ve since clued in that it’s my room so I can get in any time. I think it’s the lingering effects of last week’s cold making me fuzzy.
Had an ed-tech nerd moment this week when I realized I was trying to read Martin Weller’s 25 Years of EdTech on one screen and Jesse Stommel on my phone – at the same time… I really liked Martin’s acknowledgement of the women in ed-tech and I thought it was cool that I know, or have at least met so many of them. They inspire me. I follow the #femedtech twitter conversations, and I even have a #femedtech pin but I don’t contribute much. I should have done a quilt block. There are just so many interesting people doing cool things. I want to make more time for reading the content they share.
Wednesday Liesel, Laurie, and I met with the Department Chair for HCA to talk about BlueJeans. She was suitably impressed with how easy it was to join a meeting. I also spent a little volunteer time with the Ed-Tech users group We’re working on plans for the fall conference at Douglas College. I enjoy that kind of planning because interesting conversations happen when people from different institutions, doing similar work, get together to try and build a common theme for participants. I’m going to be transitioning out of my leadership role on the etug stewardship committee (SCETUG) this summer. I’ve done a year as chair and a year as co-chair and it’s time for someone else to step in to the leadership triad.
Today I had my third session in BlueJeans: Tidying Up: Organizing Content and Files in your Blackboard Course. There were less people in attendance this time, but still about 7. If I did this one again I would look for more opportunities for interaction. With a short time frame and a lot of material to cover, I ended up doing all the talking. The people who did respond to prompts used the chat more than the microphone. I had a lot of browser windows open with courses as examples and part way through, it seemed like some had gone missing and did what felt like a little bit of a free-fall but I think I got it back. I will follow up with participants next week and send them a hand out with some screen shots of ‘how-to’ do some of the organizational things we talked about. I got a couple of positive comments in the chat that some of the content was new to them. One more to go in this series – all about Feedback and Grading in BB.
There are things buzzing around with regards to ‘the virus’. My professional network and conversations at work indicate that more people are going to be looking for ways to communicate by distance. I anticipate a busy week next week, and an opportunity to think about how to create and share resources for the future.