I was shocked at how much I had to think about the different reasons I use technology when developing this map. I focused on what tools I use for personal and professional use.
One tool that has become so engrossed in both my professional and personal life is YouTube. I use this tool personally for entertainment and learning, and even have a few channels that I engage with regularly. Professionally, I use YouTube to deliver content to my students, which we often use as a point of entry for discussion through Google Meets, which is part of the Google Suite.
Another tool I tend to use both personally and professionally is the Google Suite. I use nearly all aspects of the Suite, even Google Scripts to create automated projects for work. I would consider the use of a product as more of a resident because I tend to engage with students and others via the many collaborative features even though it is not entirely open to the web.
My online learning management system is most likely my most significant digital footprint. I use this tool to deliver and engage students in many of my products and is the hub of most of my professional engagement and content creation.
Hi Michael,
Curious about your Youtube channel for students. How much attention do you pay to how you deliver your content ? I find it difficult to find the right balance between form and substance… feels like I always sacrifice either one or the other.
It depends on the amount of time I have to create the product. Sometimes I just need to get something out – so I do it in one take and throw it up. Other times, if time permits, I create a plan and do multiple takes with proper editing. In a perfect world I would like to create something that is engaging and informative to students, but in the real world I cannot always do that.
I am sort of the same. Ever get critical comments ? If so, how do you deal with them ?
Haha! On YouTube! Of course! If the comment is truly critical I attempt to treat it as appropriate feedback. Though when it comes to trolls I generally follow the old saying,
“Never feed the trolls.”
I assume you have some dealings, I generally have a good rapport with my students, but I imagine the teacher-student dynamic would be different at your level.
I’m really impressed by the balance across every aspect of your map. I’m interested to hear how you have create boundaries and balance around the time required to invest in these various aspects of your online “residence” against the other demands of life? This is often based on setting priorities, but I’m interested to hear how you’ve approached it.
David, I feel we are a lot alike in many aspects. First, I do not have kids – automatically, that gives me more free time than people that do. Before the COVID – 19 event, a lot of my residence online activities are built into my offline interactions. For example, I have been using a self-built LMS for nearly a decade now; this means that my work practices and online residences are often the same or at least interchangeable.
For work-life balance, I sure don’t have it. I have gotten to the point where I create audio books of our readings to listen to while I went on walks with my dogs because I am find a lack of hours and motivation in the day.
Which tool are you using to create those audio recordings for our readings? I was looking at using Google Text-to-Speech but am having a difficult time getting an audio track from it, and I don’t know any real programming languages so there’s no way I can work with the Google Cloud console to have it generate the file for me.
In Chrome, I use an extension called Read Aloud, and it has very good speech synthesis. For converting text to audio files, I use a program called Balabolka. I had to play around with this one a lot more to get decent speech out of it, though.
I honestly haven’t played around with the Google Text-to-Speech synthesizer yet. It is on the to-do list as I can see it being potent, reading out a blog/webpage to students automatically.
Hi Mike, I am curious how you use google scripts you use it more for your students or is it more personal use. I am looking for something more to engage my students since all of my lectures moving forward will now be online. Do you find your online presence has increased over the past four weeks?
I use Google Scripts to automate a lot of my processes and organize my student’s work. If you did not know you can control the Google Suite via Google Scripts. For example, I have created an upload tool that students use to upload assignments, videos, etc which automatically organize its in Google Drive folders based on the assignment and account. I use analytics a lot when it comes to grading to pinpoint or predict areas of concern/strength in student understanding, since this process is rather complex and hard to explain I tend to use Google Scripts to create graphs and visual representations that I share with students, administrators and parents.
My online presence has increase since the COVID-19 pandemic as, like you, I have moved the lecture or class portions of my practice online. It is not something I am proud of… but it is more about necessity.