This week flew by. On Tuesday afternoon (which in reality is my Monday morning) I felt like I was never going to catch up. By Thursday afternoon, things were much better. I spent a lot of time this week getting ready for my second session in BlueJeans called “Extending Learning Beyond Blackboard: Enriching the Student Experience”. I had 13 participants sign up and 11 attended. I thought i was a great turn out for a reading-break Friday. We talked about the Open ETC and WordPress and I asked them to contribute to the FacDev SPLOT that I set up. I’m not sure anyone has yet but I’ll keep an eye on it.  If you’re reading this, please feel free to contribute by clicking on ‘write’ in the top navigation bar.  This one is also still a work in progress as I figure out how to make the posts stick where I want them to. To see any existing posts (not much to see yet) click ‘random’ a few times.

Other things from today’s session included looking at BCCampus and open textbooks, Indigenization guides, toolkits, etc. I shared the textbookbroke hashtag and some stats about student savings with the use of Open textbooks. Here at NIC in only 2- 3 years with about 10 faculty adopting Open texts, students have saved around 220,000.00. In the province since 2012, that figure is over 14 million dollars! source

The last piece from today’s session included online tools for collaboration and feedback. Participants seemed excited about padlet and I had them creating pins on a padlet map that I had set up in real-time. It was fun to watch. I learned about a few other tools from some of the attendees. It was good to hear their experiences using mind-mapping and quiz/polling apps. I will see if I can figure out how share my PPT with all the  links here but I’m already running out of time for this post.

As well as today’s session I had a couple of faculty help sessions on organization and adding tools to BB Learn. I also attended CTLI and PD planning meetings. I’m working on firming up some dates for my PD plan. I also put some time into a PD application for the Festival of Learning in May.

Next week we’re meeting to start conversations about Open Textbooks and I’m excited about that. I also have a planning and standards meeting and the regular PD and CTLI meetings. In between those, I’m going to work more on my WP blogs and get ready for my next session on March 6: Tidying Up: Organizing Content and Files in BB Learn – we’re going to spark some joy! I will also follow up with participants and elicit a little feedback from today’s session.

’til next week…