First Full Day at NDSCS

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A few recent tweets:

  • The "me" of 10yrs ago would be shocked at the teacher I've evolved into. I don't have a slidedeck for tomorrow, nor do I have any major activities planned for Day 1. I'm simply going to make sure the Ss know that my class will be easy & not stressful. #ungrading
  • I am asking them to share - in #Slack - a #meme that describes who they are as humans or students or writers. Here is my contribution to that:


A non-tweet is this: I'm trying a few new things this semester. The Slack App is one, and a Suggestion Box is another. Slack will be an online gathering space for us. It won't be used for "points" or attendance, but students can share work there and engage with one another whether they can make it to class in-person or not. The Suggestion Box idea comes from Twitter, and I don't know if students will use it, but it gives them an anonymous voice to bring up anything that might make class easier/better for them (and me, too, perhaps).

I didn't change anything about the Ultra Blackboard course shell that I used this summer, beyond the deadlines. Yes, I was too tired to change much, but since it was the pilot this summer, I thought I should see if the same "issues" come this fall before going wild with tweaks and revisions.

I guess another change is that I'm not going to create daily or weekly slidedecks. That seemed to be a lot of work on my end, yet I don't think they "helped" students at all. Another change that is just a carryover from the summer is that I'm using quizzes in Blackboard to make sure students watch videos and review syllabi templates.

I was admittedly burnt out after last school year, so the lack of NEW THINGS isn't because I'm full of angst or want to punish students by withholding information. I think a switch went off somewhere saying, "Just do less, dear; no one will notice. And their experience will be the same, if not better." In the past, I was really into overdoing it... I was a busy body, sometimes creating things just to create them, and that's totally fine, but did it help students - or me? I don't think so. I think having authentic conversations in class vs sending them a link to a slidedeck is a better deal for me right now, so I'm going to go with it.

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