Notes of a New Professor

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.

In July 2007, The Future of the Book released the new CommentPress theme. At the time, I considered how I might encourage my students to use it – the obvious way being for peer review of their work.

Today I saw that James Farmer highlighted a high school biology class using CommentPress in a class wide blog hosted at Edublogs.org. What a great example, too! I’m delighted to have this to share with my own students who work in schools every day.

What’s special about the CommentPress theme? Site visitors can make page level or paragraph level comments on posts. (See this example). That capability might be very useful to M. Ed. students (and their professors) seeking feedback on their work.

In September, The Chronicle of Higher Education did a short piece on using CommentPress [pdf] in academia. It’s a quick and informative read.

The “geek chic” of the MacBook Air was tempting but I resisted and ordered the 15-inch MacBook Pro instead. Needless to say, I’m excited. I’ve been wanting a new computer for a while.