On a cruise ship! And my Bike.
We took our first a cruise ever and we spent seven blissful days on the sea and in Alaska. Pictures are good. So here are some.
We went whale watching in Juneau. It was truly unreal and some of us were kinda excited.
I also travelled far on my bike. Farthest of the year at about 60 miles! I stopped a lot and had a couple coffees and snacks. It was a beautiful day and I am very excited to do more of this over the summer!
I was invited to sit in on a colleagues class that happened to be the final class of the quarter. The students shared a wonderful Pressbooks they had completed. The faculty, Dr. Julie Shayne, is really amazing and after the class I asked her if she had printed any of the previous editions of the book. She said nope. I asked one of the librarians who worked with her to export me a copy of the book and I sent it to lulu to get printed. It turned out lovely. I wrapped it up and gave it to her with a nice card.
I finished up the grad class I was teaching. It was fun. I enjoyed using Google Sites as a space to create a living breathing class and a place that is visible to others. I think the students did too.
One thing that came out of the class and some LM crap is a conference presentation I’ll do in August. It started as mostly a joke, but it has kinda become interesting. The thing I began to learn, I think, was that maybe rather than those usual pdfs of university survey results so many faculty get at the end of the year were, well, maybe outdates and useless, I figured what if that information was in a song? That happened durning the class a few months ago and for better or worse, here is the song..
But that got me thinking about getting feedback from students in audio in general. Not that text is bad, but maybe audio is received differently. I think it is.
So I started using NotebookLM to create those silly podcasts. I used resources like QM standards and ISTE standards. I added some writing by David Wiley and a video from Stephen Downes about open pedagogy. Some high impact practice stuff and course content to create a podcast about the class and see where I might make improvements. Here is an early version of that effort.
But where I am today is playing with the “interactive” feature in the NotebookLM studio and pondering how that course take some feedback from students, some “best practices” stuff, and create a mostly reliable and meaningful conversation around steps to improve a class. That conversation might spark further reflection. And that of course is what we need. Here is sill short sample of what I have started messing with.
Anyway, that is about where I am with the effort.
Then it was the end of the month.