Hello! Long time no see!

I’ve fallen off the blogging bandwagon as of late, and I found myself in a bit of a rut with the way I was doing things.

It was a busy time–I subbed for a coworker while she went on maternity leave, and I was working with a number of students who were busy with those mid-semester lulls and the typical issues they run into with their work. But I found myself not doing a whole lot beyond that.

When I got the breath of fresh air of no longer subbing, and getting down to gradebook zero on Progress Check day, I found myself excited to start busting through all those things I had on my to-do list: making demonstration videos for things that were tripping up photo students, and doing some in-depth checks on student progress so I could send them resources to help them along. These last couple of weeks have been a blizzard of google slides and spreadsheets and email templates as I worked through all those things that had been sort of looming over my head while I was just in the grading tunnel.

As I’ve been preparing the announcement slides for my visual art course, I’ve been focusing in on one aspect of their course: an Artist’s Journal. I’ve been sharing resources that I hope get them thinking about the ways they can use their art journal (or any journal) outside the assignments in our course, since it’s such a great art practice, and a therapeutic one as well.

Then, over the weekend I helped my parents work on setting up their newly finished basement. We found some boxes in storage that were from my old bedroom–lots of long-lost treasures, broken purses, lonely socks, and one box that had every journal I owned from age 7 to age 18. They were mostly composition books, some sketchbooks and some bound journals.

My whole life I’ve suffered from a pretty severe anxiety disorder. Throughout elementary school I had anxiety attacks, although I never knew what they were and didn’t complain about them because I didn’t realize they were out of the ordinary. I’d just get really tense, everything would seem very loud, and I’d be out of breath. It would last anywhere from ten minutes to, in rare cases, about an hour. I wouldn’t really be able to speak very clearly. I didn’t want anyone to notice, so I just stayed quiet.

In middle school, I started journaling, and my anxiety quieted right down. I journaled every single day, often during class when I should’ve been taking actual notes, all throughout middle and high school. I just wrote whatever I was thinking about. I wrote to do lists, I doodled, I taped in tickets and pictures, whatever I wanted. I ended up with what is now a pretty cringey narrative of my teenage years, with some incomplete algebra notes interrupted the flow of what was going on in band that year.

I stopped journaling in college: the price of taking actual notes was apparently that my therapy time was taking a backseat. It was then that my anxiety attacks, which I now understood them to be, returned and I was finally diagnosed and put on a medication for it. I say it like this happened quickly, but in reality my anxiety was very bad throughout most of college and student teaching (2011-2016) and in 2016 (that’s so recently!) I finally made the jump and got on medication. I recently lapsed about a week and a half due to some silliness with needing the prescription refilled, and it reminded me how thankful I am for those little white pills.

I noticed the correlation between my therapeutic journaling and my general quality of life, but I was so busy! I transferred to Michigan State my junior year, and I was taking about 17-20 credits a semester. I was supporting myself living in an apartment, which meant I was working at the library during the day and a coffee shop at night, and I was pulling all nighters in the painting studio. I knew I should take a step back and do something for myself, but I always wanted to check one more thing off the to do list first.

Self Care is a real buzzword right now. I know kids today are exposed to a much more positive dialogue on mental health, and I’m really excited to be sharing some ways that the things we do in our course can be a part of the things they do for themselves.

But it’s also reminding me that I’m not working two jobs and taking 17 credits anymore, and I should be doing a better job of practicing what I preach. I’m looking forward to using the modern equivalents of my middle-school-soap-opera-notebooks and blogging, journaling, and making art for myself. I know I feel better and I do better, both personally and professionally, when I’m doing something like this, and I’m throwing myself back into it.

It’s genuinely hard to believe more than a year has passed since I started my Onboarding training with Michigan Virtual.

As part of the iEducator webinars, we created videos to talk about the stories of this first year: I guess I’ll stop talking and let it speak for itself.

 

My PLN is something I’ve been curating since long before I knew the term for it. It’s a lot of different groups, chats, and friends from different spheres.

The cool thing about being in a smaller discipline is that I was very close with my entire graduating class from Michigan State in my degree. There were fewer than a dozen of us, and only 5 that went on to student teach together, so we knew each other very well. (Hey Lauren Graham)

Getting together twice a week or more our senior year, and each Friday during our internships, was such a valuable time to trade and workshop ideas; share resources; and generally support one another.

It’s been weird to move from that sort of structure to the online environment, where our meet-ups are online and our sharing is down through social media, but it’s no less a valuable experience! I love collaborating and sharing through twitter, instagram, facebook, pinterest, google…so many places.

As a first year teacher, I haven’t submitted all that much to my PLN yet. I’ve been more of a “lurker,” absorbing and learning and trying to get my feet on the ground.

That’s pretty typical of me: I’m often more comfortable listening and absorbing and jotting things down to brew in my mind for the near future: it’s how I’ve always operated in learning environments. However, through the weekly webinars we do here at Michigan Virtual I have felt like I bring something valuable to the table, and I’ve shared what I know–it’s always heartening to feel like I’ve got something helpful others would be interested in!

I’m looking forward to building my expertise and continuing to grow as an educator, and sharing more and more.

After our webinar on quality online assessments, I took some time in my courses to look critically at a lot of the assessments there, and what made them effective.

There are so many different things at play in efficacy. But as I tried to break them down, what I found was a sort of tree of requirements. After all, the assignment would need to fit with the learning objectives in order to be effective, but if it weren’t accessible to the student or interesting, then that was a bit of a moot point–we’d never get that far.

So I tried to take a look at the biggest catch-all: our oldest friend, engagement. If students were engaged and putting their all into something, then we can be off to a good start.

Which assignments did students seem to take seriously–and how can I measure that? I looked for strong opinions, creativity, individuality, and even argument. After all, if a student were invested enough to say “I disagree with X on principle,” I know they’re fired up.

I’ve been keeping this on the back burner of my mind as I grade, looking for those (super exciting) places where students seem fired up, excited, angry, or at least awake. And what I found was pretty interesting!

• Test Subject One: Film Studies, Directors of the Golden Age

Golden Age was a serious standout as I looked at it, because the assessments in the course are primarily essay tests. Even I groan when I think the phrase “essay test.” But this was a sort of underdog winner in the category of student excitement, because I often find that they’re writing passionate, opinionated answers to the questions. And the more I think about that, the more sense it makes.

These questions are multifaceted, opinion based, and open ended. Which is awesome! Students who have watched the films (to my relief, seemingly almost all of them–very rarely do I get answers that have me banging my head on the desk and shaking my fist at my bff Wikipedia) enjoy sharing their opinions on them, and they have so many awesome points to make. I love reading their answers!

It puts me in mind of my book club. When we go and open up the discussion questions from the back of the book we get fired up. On paper, it looks like we’re about to quiz each other, but the discussion that happens is so awesome.

What’s surprising is that I have so much more of that valuable discussion happening in the essay test than in the discussion board.

What it comes down to, I think, is the structure of the questions. The discussion board prompts are TOO open ended:

 

I’m with you guys. I’m not sure what to say to that either. It’s only after some specifics get thrown around that many people will start to remember their own examples, thoughts, and opinions.

•  Test Subject Two: Careers, Find Your Future

This is a course that students tend to phone in, which is unfortunate: it teaches some really valuable things that I wish I had known more about before I had to do them for real, like choosing a college program, looking for scholarships, choosing a careers, and looking for job openings.

It seems like a course students would be engaged in, because it’s so individualized. After all, students aren’t told “say you’re a nurse. Find a nursing job.” They take personality and aptitude quizzes, they look at statistics, they pick some things they’re interested in, and they use those fields and careers to do the assignments.

But at the end of the day, a worksheet is a worksheet. And I feel them–when I think the phrase “worksheet,” I’m thrown right back into a specific high school math course with the single least engaging teacher I ever had (and, as luck would have it, I had her 3 times–I blame this bad luck for my total inability to remember how long division works), and I can feel my eyes glazing over. I’m not sure if it’s because they see the format of the assignment and go into autopilot from their Pavlovian experience with them, or if it’s something more nuanced in the way the assignments are written, but the answers I read are often robotic and here-for-the-points. Yes, because X. No, because Y. I enjoyed this assignment.

Did you, though? 

So where to go from here? I want to find ways to insert some passion into those areas that are lacking. Be it by giving the discussion boards a starting point, like an “agree or refute this statement” prompt option or by infusing Careers with some more engaging extra material, I want to up the engagement across all my courses. And I plan to do that by continuing to pay attention to what students respond positively to.

 

Returning from the 2018 MACUL conference a couple of weeks ago, I’ve had so many ideas and resources and goals whirling around in my mind. The drive home from Grand Rapids was exciting: and how awesome is it to spend Friday afternoon looking forward to Monday morning?

I’ve been sifting through the resources I received and the notes I took, but there was that inevitable screeching-to-a-halt when I settled into my desk chair and realized how buried in grading I was. (What a week for Film Studies to decide to be very prolific essay writers.)

Fortunately, that grading time left me to back-burner a lot of what happened at the conference, and one of the things that stood out to me was the comparison of two of the sessions I had attended: one that was very helpful and exciting, and one that was not very helpful, and pretty boring. The thing that linked them was that they brought up several of the same tools, but presented them in such different ways.

Leslie Fisher was, no surprise, the helpful and exciting presenter whose session left me excited to play with all my new apps and sites. Some of the things she’d demoed had also been included in another presentation I attended, but that presenter had used a basic slideshow. She’d listed the name, provided a link, and used a couple of bullets to describe what made them useful to her.

This sounds like a perfectly valid way of sharing information, and I wouldn’t think a thing of it if I hadn’t been introduced to those same resources in such a more dynamic and engaging way later that day, by Leslie Fisher. It took about the same amount of time to show me what it was and let me experience it as it did to give a description–but the truth is that I had no idea what those things were during the just-slides version, and there was nothing engaging to remind and inspire me later.

While I was digging through those grades, I was thinking about this in the back of my mind and comparing it to what I do. It left me afraid that some of the information I presented to my students was more like that slideshow: how can I do more than just offer the information for them to find at their leisure? What can I do to make the information engaging and memorable?

I was thinking a lot about my announcements, and about the Digital Imaging Final Portfolio. The Final Portfolio will be most of what I’m grading for the next nine weeks, as it comprises the second half of the Digital Imaging course and I’m teaching 2 sections right now. It’s such a broad assignment, and I started to make connections between the slideshow presentation and the list of resources and suggestions I was offering students to use as they planned their projects.

I tried to put these thoughts to use and create a more dynamic and memorable way of sharing ideas with students. I tried to focus on visuals and videos that would be more engaging and memorable, and made a slideshow to replace my bulleted list.

I also wanted to share some of the more game-like resources with my students, but taking a page from Leslie Fisher’s book, I didn’t just tell them to go look; I made a video of myself playing with Google’s Quick, Draw! AI and invited students to do the same.

I’m looking forward to doing more to make the content I’m sharing with students memorable and engaging!

In a message with a student last week, it came up that in Digital Imaging students never really have a platform to share or show off their art to one another.

This hit me as one of the major differences between this online context and a face to face classroom: that there was no opportunity for students to see one another’s work, critique or compliment it, or draw inspiration from one another. It got me thinking about the ways that I could bring that into the online classroom.

I created an announcement with two proposed solutions:

1. The Class Gallery

I created a discussion board topic for students to share their work. I wrote instructions for sharing an image in their post, and an attached file outlining the kind of feedback I expected (always supportive) with some examples of how to write a comment in a kind and constructive way.

In one class, I made a post myself with my icon drawing, in the hopes that that would get it rolling—in the other, I left it empty. (For science.)

2. Instagram

The second route I offered was that I would post work on my teacher Instagram (@ms.nalepa) if students were willing. I stressed that their work is their own, and I would only share it with their consent: I included a google form where they could answer Yes, share my art; No; or Maybe (ask about the specific piece.)

Students are divided perfectly 2:1 between yes and maybe. Many students didn’t answer the poll, either because they don’t read my announcements 🙁 or because that was their way of saying no. But I have so far received 36 responses out of ~100 students, ~60 of whom are active in the art-making parts of the course (the rest of whom I’m dragging out of the citation practice and quiz taking murkiness of the beginning.)

I also included a Questions/Comments/Concerns box in the form: this whole project was born in about a day, so I assumed I’d missed something students would be worried about.

One student asked if my account was private. It wasn’t, but I changed it so it was. Another student, in a sort of opposite direction, asked me to tag her personal account in any of her artwork. Some students wanted anonymity and privacy, while others wanted credit for their work.

One student even thanked me for the option, which made me feel pretty good.

The discussion board so far only has 2 posts by students: one in each section. I made an announcement encouraging others to go comment and share their own work, and I’ve begun mentioning that some pieces are great candidates for the board in feedback: on work that demonstrates a big triumph for a particular student, or works that present creative ways of thinking based on the different prompts.

I’m hoping to see more posts and discussion soon!

(PS:  Just got my 37^th survey response, so at least someone is reading my announcements.)

My first true week at Michigan Virtual was a hectic relief–there were a thousand and one things going on, but I was so glad I finally knew what it would be like.

Over the summer I taught 5 separate courses with a total of only 10 students across all of them. It was an interesting experience, as I had time to get acquainted the material, the system, the students; but I knew it wasn’t really an indicator of what my First Week Of School would be like.

I think the thing which surprised me the most was the number of messages I’ve been receiving on blackboard. Not including texts, calls, or regular emails, I have received 179 messages. The last thing I did before opening this blog post was answer messages, and I now have 4 unread ones.

The sheer volume of these has made it difficult to answer them (so many are introductions with contact info, and I’ve skimmed them at best.) After all, I also have their work to grade, and their discussion posts to read, and announcements to write. I’d also like to fit in some sleep, if I can manage it.

However, the more of their messages I read the more I realize that while I have 179 and counting piling up in my inbox, they have 0. And many of them have 1 in their outbox, and it was a message they wrote carefully, and signed off so kindly.

The student who took the time to tell me in their introduction message about their excitement to be entering a culinary arts program at a local college, I had to answer. I had to tell them how wonderful that was, and that I couldn’t wait to see how they used photography from their cooking in our digital imaging work.

Another student opened up to tell me that since moving here from the Caribbean, they attended a high school in another state and struggled socially as an English Language Learner. That same student has been enthusiastically active on the discussion board, where they’ve been able to take the time to run their messages through Google translate and take part in the conversation.

One thing I was uncertain about when I joined Michigan Virtual was how I’d be able to forge relationships with students in an online context. Although I’ve always been an introverted person, and enormously preferred written communication to spoken, I just wasn’t sure how it would compare to the Face-to-Face environment that I knew.

Although the last thing I need on my plate at the moment is a new goal, I’ve decided to let no personal interaction go unacknowledged. I’m excited to get to know them and see them grow and learn.