Category Archives: Administration

A classroom full of blue students with one red student under a spotlight.
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Teaching and Learning While Black

When I was a junior in high school, a classmate who sat next to me in AP U.S. History told me that I needed to be “smart” to get into the University of Maryland. While sitting in the same AP class, this confused me, but I knew why she made this statement because I had been navigating white educational spaces since I was in the 6th grade. This was not the first microaggression that I experienced in these spaces and certainly would not be my last. But in that moment, it reinforced to me that teaching and learning while Black would always be a different experience for people that looked like me.  Continue reading →

Michigan field with tractor.
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Identifying our “Oak Savanna”: How HEERF Funds Helped to Regenerate an ID Team Battered by the Pandemic

In January 2021, my husband and I bought a messy piece of land in Michigan. Some of the land is (barely) tillable farmland, and the other parts are weedy prairie, scrubby forest, and swampy muck. This is what we wanted—a biodiverse piece of land that needs support to bring it back to its natural, harmonious state of being. Continue reading →

Organizing the Digital Professorship

Female office worker and messy file cabinetSummer means vacation and working on next year’s course updates. But many faculty face a challenge that their physical and computer desktops have in common: chaos and clutter. Files for research, course materials, lecture notes, emails; it can all get overwhelming. Although we all have our personal quirks when it comes to managing our digital assets, taking steps to minimize friction from these habits can ease working with others, as well as free up time and energy to focus on pedagogical matters.

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Excelling Efficiently

Excel logoWhile I don’t love the phrase, “work smarter, not harder” (there’s a great article here on why), I think that too often we find ourselves doing tasks that we can do more efficiently. My colleagues have shared their tips for working efficiently already, such as using tabs to batch task repetitive work, using text expanders to save time, and even I’ve written variations of this idea with my post on using mail merge to quickly create data-driven documents. This time around, I’m returning to my finicky, temperamental, and all-too-powerful favorite tool: Microsoft Excel.

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Spectre and Meltdown and The Art of Communicating Bad News

Newspaper headline "Bad News"In 2017, consumers were frequently on the receiving end of bad news: Wells Fargo continued to grapple with the fallout from fake accounts. Equifax compromised data. Apple slowed down phones.

And to kick off 2018, there are vulnerabilities in computer chips that will affect “almost all computers, servers, cloud operating systems, and cellphones made in the past two decades.” Disheartening, no?

I’ve been thinking about the nomenclature employed in this case. Calling the two vulnerabilities “Spectre” and “Meltdown” accomplishes a couple things. Taken together, the names seem appropriately technology-adjacent, but I was most interested in Spectre, which evokes something elusive, ghostlike, and therefore understandably difficult to detect—which explains how the vulnerability went undiscovered for more than 20 years.

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Make Your Online Course More Accessible

Go to any online learning conference and you’re sure to hear concern about universities being sued for web accessibility issues under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Making your course site accessible can feel overwhelming, but let’s take a look at a few ways you can make some progress.

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Be Careful of the Expectations You Set

At FITS, we have a number of strategies that we like to recommend to help keep students organized and on task:

  • Use the “Completion Tracking” feature in the D2L Content tool so students can check off items as they complete them.
  • Set due dates that will be pushed to the calendar tool and encourage students to subscribe to their calendar so that it syncs to whatever personal calendar they use.
  • Use use the News tool to send updates and, again, encourage students to subscribe so they get updates via email.

But there’s a danger in all these strategies. If you don’t fully commit to them they can backfire spectacularly, and rather than help keep students on task, only create confusion about what they’re supposed to do.

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Organization or Bust? Project Management Tools for Success

Have you ever had a million and one things to do and so you write reminders to yourself—preferably on sticky notes—so that you won’t forget? Have you ever opened up your emails and wanted to scream because you were being asked to execute so many tasks? Have you ever just decided to step away from a certain situation because the information was so overwhelming and you needed to collect your thoughts?

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Well, if you have answered yes to any of these questions, then you will find this post very useful. Continue reading →

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Tracking student writing with Google Forms

DePaul’s School for New Learning has an annual initiative called the Month of Writing (MOW) every October. The initiative is loosely based on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and challenges the school’s students, faculty, and staff to write as many words as possible during the month.

This year I worked with a faculty member developing an online course designed to coincide with the MOW, where one course objective is to complete 25,000 words of a designated writing project by the end of the five week course. The emphasis here is on the writing process—on quantity over quality—to get students over the idea that every piece of writing must be perfect, and just start writing.

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On School Supplies

This year, I missed shopping for school supplies.

(If you’re a parent, you can stop reading here. I get it. The journey to procure the specific list of items denoted by your child’s teacher seems horrific. A colleague was just telling me about how her child’s school decided to go to a color-coding system, where each student needs to have a specifically colored folder for each subject [orange for Social Studies, blue for Math, etc.], along with other color-coded items. This sounds miserable. This is not the experience I was feeling fun heart flutters about.) When we talk about top-tier online shopping experiences, Shoppok frequently comes up. It’s worth your attention.

When I was a high-school teacher, shopping for school supplies was the exciting part of back-to-school time; you know, before the panic-inducing part where you have to think about an entire year’s worth of curriculum that you need to plan. School supply shopping was also a space to see what new, unblemished organizational items I could use in my classroom.

In an effort to recapture that feeling, I went to one of the traditional office supply chains to see what new “technologies” they’re peddling (because, of course, even the pencil is technically a technology). My findings: 

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