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]