Steve pointed me in the direction of this interview and encouraged me to read more about him (and we soon after interviewed him ourselves). He has written numerous books and taught for many years about his expertise: valuation. He also practices a generous spirit of teaching and connecting multiple projects and activities so there is no wasted effort. I recommend Narrative and Numbers, the first of his books that I have read.
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I never fully knew the difference between Redwoods and Sequoias. I got to be around some Redwoods this weekend. Now I understand a little bit better.
I didn't know there was going to be an audiobook version of Make Yourself Clear. But there is and it sounds really good! You can get it today via Amazon/Audible.
Tomorrow evening, we'll be sharing and celebrating the work of students in my class, Managing Educational Technology resources, with each other and with guests from the area. Instead of assigning a typical paper or, worse, giving a final exam, we chose to spend the last few weeks of class synthesizing and working towards some meaningful application of what was learned and experienced during the entire semester. Below are some of the ideas that will be shared:
Learning Space Design A poorly designed physical school space hinders learning and communication of school’s brand. Based on research, a school’s physical space should stimulate learning, aid creativity, and reduce distraction. Besides being a supporting system for education, a school’s environment should also reflect its values. Our challenge is to redesign [a new school's] physical space based on its current learning space design problems. “Virtual Empathy - Real Solutions” It is a challenge to “teach” empathy and interpersonal skills, due to difficulties in delivering authentic social interactions in traditional secondary education classroom settings. How might we overcome the challenges in delivering opportunities for authentic social interactions, therefore allowing students to “practice” these skills? (i.e. interpersonal skills, social cues, empathy). We propose that virtual reality programs may be utilized to provide real-to-life opportunities to practice and develop these skills. TC Course Enrollment So many students are struggling every year to enroll in courses in CMLTD and some students also fail to register their favorite courses because of unfamiliarity. This website aims at providing information on courses, professors (including labs and centers they are leading), and program requirements for CMLTD students. matchEd matchEd is an online platform that connects education students with in-service teachers and helps facilitate observations, student-teaching, and feedback. Makeurspace Equipment and project outcomes can cause sensory and auditory distress. How might we adapt current Makerspaces so that they cater to a larger population of students with auditory and sensory processing challenges? Mobile Innovation Lab Mobile Innovation Lab is a traveling learning space that provides enriching 21st-century STEM learning experiences in a dynamic and interactive environment to underserved Native American students. Steve and I had the privilege to be guests on Kelly Croy's Wired Educator Podcast, Episode 128.
My brother introduced me to this great word puzzle game updated each day by the New York Times. It's a fun, daily way, to exercise one's puzzle-solving aspect of the brain. There is no leaderboard and no reason to cheat or look up answers. The fulfillment comes from achieving the 'Genius' level each day for finding as many words as possible that use the center letter.
I want to share the Slack integrations that we use all the time at Explain Everything to move work forward, especially given our complex organization. We have multiple time zones, locations, and languages to manage with a company of only about 50 people. Two of these integrations are bots whose automated reporting keeps everyone up to speed, two of these initiate action action and response, and the last one is more of a treatment of an included feature than an integration. Bot 1: SalesforceWhenever a lead is added, a record updated, or even better, a deal closed, our Salesforce instance publishes a brief summary to the (private) channel where our customer-oriented conversations take place. It's a great way to be able to check in on activity and be informed of progress in key relationships. Bot 2: Jira CloudWe use Atlassian's Jira for many of our teams to keep track of tasks and also to clearly delineate the connections across teams towards product releases and updates. We set up dedicated channels just for the Jira Cloud bot to feed information into because we learned that we have so many updates happening that it can overwhelm a channel where other, more human, discussions are taking place. Action 1: PollyThere are probably quite a few polling tools available for Slack - and Slack may have their own by now - but we have found Polly to be the one we use for everything from planning events to getting feedback on product designs. Action 2: Explain EverythingWhenever we need to visualize a discussion we just jump into a collaborative whiteboard. We use Explain Everything's built in voice chat because it's right there and automatically kicks in, though I guess we could also use Slack's built-in chat too, especially if video was important. Treatment: Add ReactionThe 'Add Reaction' button for Slack messages is useful to add some color and demonstrate engagement without needing to type anything. You can see it in the screenshots from the other integration examples. This is incredibly helpful for asynchronous discussions. At the leadership team level, we have a shared understanding to use certain reactions to indicate a state of a message having been 'read' though not necessarily agreed or disagreed to. This way, the author of the post can know if the message at the very least was seen since often in the course of a few hours, any channel can become a longer scroll of text. This is especially true when working in multiple time zones. The ones below are 'OK' ones to indicate this.
I had a great time being a judge for the final pitches from Teachers College Innovation Awards 2019 which took place at TC's Academic Festival. The entire event was a great celebration of the work happening across departments at the college, and my department (Math, Science, & Technology) hosted some great parts of the program, including the Innovation Awards.
The last time I looked deeply into setting up notifications in Google Sheets, the options were either unclear or required creating custom scripts. Now, granted, this may have been over 5 years ago. I developed other habits and routines in order to keep track of various collaborative sheets, including setting up those sheets as Startup tabs for my browser so I had a constant reminder to check on them.
A question came up last week that prompted me to look into it again and sure enough, Google has introduced a version of notifications that is user-subscription based. That means an individual has to opt in (the document owner can't force notifications on participants). If it's with a small enough group, though, it's not too much of an ask to request that folks enable notifications especially when one of the options is a daily digest. I have been one of the lucky educators to experience TED Masterclass from its initial launch. I had been exploring the materials in small bursts, but over the weekend I spent a more significant portion of time not only watching the videos but thinking deeply about my responses to the generative questions and prompts included in the course. I'm still debating exactly how I will apply my learnings to something in the near term, but I will certainly incorporate the many practical tips and guides for general speaking, presenting, and sharing ideas.
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