Notes of a New Professor

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.

A few of us started our own informal professional development initiative and today was our first Lunch ‘n’ Learn meeting. It started so easily – I offered to show folks how to create a narrated slide show using Photo Story and someone else suggested we make these little demos a regular event. We quickly agreed to do these on days we have Faculty Assembly – about once a month.

Today, there were six of us – one more than we could comfortably fit around the table if we leave room for a laptop to do the demo. (Will we need to find a bigger space? How exciting will that be?) My demo had serious flaws (ugh, sound problems!) but it didn’t matter. Our conversation focused on how and why we might use tools like this in our own teaching and how we might introduce this to our Master’s students for their own teaching.

I said this Lunch ‘n’ Learn started easily, but will it flourish? I hope so. Today, one of my colleagues asked if anyone had something they wanted to learn the next time and I hope asking that question at the end of each session will help us keep up the momentum. By the way, I waited just barely long enough for everyone else to shrug their shoulders before chiming in with something I’d like to learn to do. That’s on tap for our next Lunch ‘n’ Learn and I’m excited!

This photo from Flickr’s CreativeCommons pool by Swansea Photographer