Month: November 2020

iPad Only?!

Updates: see the comments below this post…

Two days ago, I took my work laptop into the shop for warrantee work on the keyboard. Since then, I’ve been doing almost all of my work on my iPad. I have a personal iMac that I could use, but mostly as an experiment I wanted to see if I could use my iPad for work. It’s generally been a success.

Not surprisingly, there are a few things I cannot do.

  • I logged in with my personal iMac to view a course assignment that featured the WC Peer Eval tool. It is an antiquated tool and would not run in Chrome or Safari on my iPad.
  • I’m limited by what I can do in the Smartsheet app, so I have to make sure I’m using it in Safari.
  • A number of the hot-keys do not work the way I expect, so I’m not as fast performing a number of functions I’m used to.
  • I use my iPhone for Zoom, mounted on a stand above my iPad because the built-in camera on my iPad has me “looking down” at everyone. My camera also cuts out whenever I switch to a different app during a meeting to do things like update or view the meeting notes.
  • I’ve lost the ability to keep a large array of items in my clipboard. Having an app to do that on my laptop saves me a lot of time on certain tasks. Thankfully, the MacOS ecosystem allows me to copy something on my iPhone and paste it immediately onto my iPad without having to do anything.

I am surprised that the smaller screen really isn’t a big problem, but I’m used to working around that. Unlike many of my peers, I haven’t used an external monitor once since we switched to remote work back in the spring.

Using the College’s virtual machine also helps because it allows me to access a “full desktop” right from my iPad.

What’s the purpose or benefit? Well, I have a lot more confidence and knowledge of being able to work remotely with very little while not having to sacrifice any productivity.

Questions about Designing Teaching for Inclusion and Diversity

I attended a workshop yesterday for IST faculty called “Inclusive ADDIE” and at one point, we were asked the following questions based on what we had learned so far.

  1. How would you design a student group project for one of your classes?
  2. How would you handle dividing students into groups?
  3. How would you revise the content, examples, resources?

I don’t feel like I had great answers based on what I had learned. I started with what I would do without particular thought to inclusion and diversity.

  1. How would you design a student group project for one of your classes? Start with learning outcomes, then decide upon an assessment and rubric if needed, develop directions that includes all the required references to relevant learning content, review my content for accessibility.
  2. How would you handle dividing students into groups? I don’t think I would change. I prefer to form groups based on the order that students made submissions to the first, low-stakes assignment of the course. Having said that, if this were a WC section I would also try to account for timezones.
  3. How would you revise the content, examples, resources? I would look to make sure that I am considering minority groups at least ⅓ of the time in all of my examples, content, and assessments. This one, I took directly from the content of the workshop.

After listening to some other participant’s responses, I copied or added the following:

  1. How would you design a student group project for one of your classes? Provide reminders to class guidelines related to etiquette and group work. We have or can find these guidelines, but I wonder how inclusive and diverse those guidelines already are?
  2. How would you handle dividing students into groups? I didn’t have anything new to add here. Teaching through the WC, I do not get to know the students enough to be able to assign groups in ways that account for inclusion and diversity. I don’t think that’s how groups are formed in the real world, so why should I try to make accommodations in my class? I believe that my role would be to try to address issues around inclusion and diversity if they present themselves. I realize that is a slippery slope because if I am not openly addressing inclusion and diversity through out the course, how will my students know that I will address those concerns when there is an issue in the class. How will students even know to be mindful of inclusion and diversity practices in my class? Perhaps I need to develop a resource for faculty to help us provide guidelines to students about working in groups in ways that are inclusive and diverse? Teaching from the WC course template for the class I teach, I’m not sure we have much information about best practices for students working in groups. Perhaps I need to start there and include universal best practices in that resource from the start.
  3. How would you revise the content, examples, resources? I believe Jon Hughes mentioned to create group assignments with roles to allow for individuals to have a voice. This reminded me of Col. Jake Graham (ret. USMC) group work assignments where he will assign students different analytical roles depending upon the scenario/exercise he’s provided them. Dr. Lynette Yarger reminded us of something Dr. Alison Murphy shared with faculty during her McMurtry Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award presentation: create something for an under-represented community and through doing so, you will learn more about that community.

Photoshop… still the best for GIFs

Tutorial: Create an animated GIF from a series of photos

I’ve tried some so-called, purpose-built GIF apps like GIF Brewery 3 and Photoshop is still the best for creating compact, quality GIFs. It gives me the most control, but there are a lot of additional steps and things to confuse those new to Photoshop.

I still have to consider the pedagogical application of when to best use a GIF. You have to consider your audience. The size, quality, and timing all play into whether the work I am creating will be effective. I made the GIF below for the director of my office, but chose to send static images because I had to get the information to her quickly and didn’t want to confuse her with how I formatted the information.

Walk through of viewing the Revision History on a WordPress page

Related:

  1. Using GIFs of Screencasts, 10/24/19
  2. MOV to GIF, 2/23/16

Additional: to make a screen capture of a specific window on a Mac, click the space bar after pressing command-shift-4 and then position the camera icon over the window you would like to capture and then click the mouse