Notes of a New Professor

Last night, I ran across this post by Seb Schmoller. In it, he offers 8 suggestions. I think we’ve hit most of these in our class, but Intute (#2) was a new find for me.

Although I frequently use del.icio.us (#5), I haven’t advocated for you to start. You might consider it. Goodness knows, I get a lot of benefit from it with over 1500 tagged sites and counting. What’s del.icio.us all about? This video from The CommonCraft Show explains it:

You can use Google Reader (#7) to subscribe to del.icio.us tags so new resources come into your Google Reader account just like new blog posts do. You can sign up for certain tags or things from certain people or even certain tags from certain people.You can also look at del.icio.us accounts in useful ways. For example, my user name is fiedler. One of the tags I use is med505. If you ever want to see all of the resources I’ve tagged as useful for this class, you can at http://del.icio.us/fiedler/med505/. That gives you four pages! Yikes. Maybe you are only interested in the MED505 tags that deal with writing. That’s as easy as adding a + sign. http://del.icio.us/fiedler/med505+writing/.

Adding del.icio.us to your online toolkit is not required for this class, but I highly recommend you play with it when you have a few free moments. As useful as it is for your life as a student, it will be even more useful for you as a teacher. Don’t believe me? Go back and watch the video if you skipped it.

My last post was marked “Protected” for a bit more privacy.

• Find out how to make your own private posts in this Jing video.
• See how to access a private post in this one.

When you make a private post, you can share your password with authorized post readers – like members of this class!

Want to find the perfect website or journal article without digging through thousands of hits? A Boolean search can help you do that and Boolify can help you figure out how to build your Boolean search. See how it works in this Jing video. [Opens in a new window]

Back in February, I made a blog post about the first Lunch ‘n’ Learn session with my colleagues. This past Tuesday, we had our third session where I demonstrated how I’ve been using Jing to create simple video tutorials for my students. It was the most successful session to date! There were four other professors and one staff member who attended. By the end of the week, two (!) told me they had made their first Jing screencast and that they were excited about it.

One of the women in the Career Development office helps preservice teachers create their resumes before they start looking for their first teaching jobs. She decided to use Jing to give feedback to one of the students and find out what the student thought of the new style of feedback. It turns out, that she loved it! It looks like Jing may have found a home over in Career Development, too.

My Master’s students have spent the last week grappling with the challenge of finding time for professional development. We have that challenge at the college, too and some of us have decided to meet once a month during lunch for a brief professional development activity. It’s working pretty well although we all have other things that sometimes get in the way. That’s okay, too. We can be satisfied that we’re accomplishing a lot without feeling guilty that we sometimes have to work on other things. Its a great way for us to share ideas with each other.