T-minus one day to online teaching

Today, I didn’t prepare any new material. I reviewed my plans. I thought through what needs to happen tomorrow – what I need to communicate to my students and what questions I should be prepared for. I thought through all my troubleshooting strategies for when Teams doesn’t work, people can’t find the chat, or Sakai crashes at 9:00 AM when we all log into it simultaneously. I’m happy with my decision to keep content focused on a small number of platforms, but tell students about other out-of-band ways to reach me so that if (when?) those platforms go down, I’m not inaccessible.

I made up my to-do list for next week, but I’m also treating that as tentative until after I get through tomorrow. The good thing is that I have two MWF classes that will have students engaging in them, an advising appointment, office hours, a research meeting, and a committee meeting all scheduled. So in one day I’ll get to test out a pretty wide swath of the types of things I have to be able to do.

I also finished tidying up my home office. I had already cleaned up the bit that is visible through my web cam, but my craft shelves were a bit of a mess and I’ve been spending a lot of time staring at them. So I feel ready for a start for a new format for the second half of the term with things nice and organized here.

So, the countdown is over, and tomorrow morning we see what happens.

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