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.

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]

One of the fun things I get to do because I teach online is play with new tools on a regular basis. Is this my own professional development? Am I being productive? Am I just playing? I think the answer to all three is “yes.”

This latest project started about two months ago when I was Skyping with a colleague. Their teachers’ college has a Macintosh laptop initiative and they are switching to RapidWeaver for student portfolio development. I played with RapidWeaver a year or two ago and decided I should look at it again.

My new faculty web page is the result of my dabbling. The little springy things on the first page and on each of the class pages make me smile. I might get tired of them but for now, I think I’ll let them stay.

I know I should work to integrate my faculty web page and professional portfolio into one cohesive unit but I think that will be a task for summer.

Chris Lehman, an edublogger and the principal at a Science Academy in Philadelphia posted this Letter to a Young Teacher yesterday. I think it will resonate with the M. Ed. students I met two weeks ago. I don’t think they’re considering leaving the profession at the moment, but they might one day.

I am sharing this with the hope that Lehman’s post will give my students a spark of inspiration as they work on their Personal Vision statements in the coming module.

My students are using their new blogs to carry on the discussions we might have done in D2L’s discussion boards. At the end of the class, they’ll choose a collection of their blog posts that represent their efforts in this class. This collection is one of the biggest assignments of the class and the assignment was inspired by one Dennis Jerz assigned his students at Seton Hill.

I loved his idea of including wild cards. In the blog collection, I am requiring my students to ‘[i]nclude two blog entries on any topic that is professionally relevant. The entries should demonstrate your achievements as a blogger, a teacher, or a leader. If you decided to take a risk trying to embed an unfamiliar technology in an entry, a wildcard entry is a great place to show that – whether it worked or not!”

I was going to make this blog post about something else, but it occurred to me that I should share this instead. At a minimum, it shows them one of many possibilities for a wild card entry for their own blogs.

Here’s how the events leading to this post unfolded.

I read an email from a student asking about making comments on her classmates’ blogs. After all, this blogging thing is new to them.
Made a Jing screencast to show her how to do what she had asked me about.
Noticed that she was on Skype, and sent her the link to the screencast.
A few minutes later, she Skyped me again saying she just submitted her first comment to a classmates. I’m confident she was successful.

Here’s the screencast – embedded in the blog.