This bell is in the garden of the Villa Ganz in Guadalajara. Just ring if you need me. Feels for this week.
The best laid plans… it was a strange week for productivity. There were comings and goings, dog sitting, people we needed to be there for. Fortunately I didn’t have a lot of meetings and could be a little flexible with my time. Part of the strangeness, I think, is that a lot of people are on vacation, there are no workshops and the energy is kind of low. Even working remotely there is a lot of interaction when we’re busy. I do appreciate the time to actually get to work on some of the other things there hasn’t been much time for.
I had intended to be finished with the student training course by end of day Monday. See above re: productivity… I did finish it (Thursday) at least in the sense that the information I wanted in there is in there. I made a few changes in how content was presented and I like it. It makes me want to tweak more though and at some point you just have to stop.
I also met with an instructor about BlueJeans so she could do some hands on and she now feels more confident about using it.
I sat in on a couple of BCcampus sessions to get a feel for how the synchronous sessions in the FLO bootcamp course were run. I’ll be co-facilitating the third iteration in a couple of weeks. It was interesting to hear the perspectives and experiences of instructors from other institutions who have had to make drastic changes to their teaching. Some instructors don’t even know what tools are available to them at their institutions.
I picked up a few links from these sessions (in no curated order).
- Article on remote proctoring – creepy.
- Nice resource that Josie Gray shared on accessibility and complex images. This was something I really struggled with trying to convert Power Point slides to html for a course in agricultural economics. I think I’m going to get it printed in colour.
- Someone shared this link for making infographics: piktochart
- The “impromtu gauntlet” technique for student presentations
Mike fixed the self-enroll option for the student training course and we tested it out as students. There is an ugly red error message that shows at the top but the option to enroll is in the course menu. I think I am going to add a little context to the existing Student resources tab about how to enroll.
I am off again for a little while. Using up some more vacation time. I’ll have a couple of days to brush up on studios and see where I can improve sessions and clean up the practice courses I use. I think we’ll be very busy again after the 17th. A little break before will be good.
I have September’s schedule figured out. I am going to try doing mornings four days a week and see how that goes.
Back again in a couple of weeks.