Education

Back in January I posted some goals for the Spring semester here, with the intention of revisiting them at the end of the term to see how I did. I was tempted to let myself off the hook, but I did have half a term during which things were relatively normal, and reflection is good, so let’s see how I did. Goal 1: Provide feedback as guidance more than correction in my object-oriented programming course. I think I did pretty well here. I definitely kept this in mind all semester; as I graded I tried to focus on whether there … Continue reading Spring 2020 Goals, Revisited

One of the things I tried this semester for the first time was adding a mandatory one on one meeting with me for every student where I would review their progress on the final project. Having completed those meetings, I am very glad I chose to do them and think they were a huge contribution to the remote learning versions of my courses. I have mixed thoughts about whether I will continue them for in-person instruction. For my OO programming course, this was a major addition to the course and a big win. I’ve always counted on students dropping by … Continue reading Adding Check-in Meetings to Projects

I’ve slowed down on posting about the remote education situation because now most of the challenges have to do with supporting specific students. While these are still interesting challenges, being at a small school with small classes, any amount of detail about these situations can easily end up revealing personal information. So, take it as given – students are struggling in unique ways and individualized solutions need to be found. I think that’s universal to all of our courses right now. In terms of updates I can make, I noticed a nice benefit to having students use chat for problem … Continue reading An Upside to Text Chatting about Code

I spent a lot of the past two days dithering on whether to keep a day of content in my AI course or to replace it with a “personal working day” to give the students space and time to work on their research projects before we have our one-on-one conferences. I’m sure any of you reading this are yelling at me “personal working day, not more content!”. Which is obviously the right answer. But the lost week of class and the much slower pace once we returned as I let students get accustomed to the new format definitely has me … Continue reading Further adventures in adapting to remote learning

I think it is a good sign that I’m not making new discoveries in online teaching on a daily basis anymore. But, this past week, I finally felt like the students had got used to the general rhythm of watching video lectures, taking short quizzes or posting in the forum, and doing coding activities while I was available for one on one questions. I was hearing the students were starting to miss interacting with each other. So, this past Friday, I got students back working together on coding tasks during class time. I’m not worrying about audio or video – … Continue reading Reintroducing Collaborative Problem Solving

Week one of online teaching is wrapped up, and week two is on its way, though with my office and classroom being the same space and also where I spend time hanging out in the evening reading or getting work done, the days are definitely blending together. New adventures for the coming week include: Giving an exam – this is coming up Monday morning and the students seem to feel pretty good about their ability to take an exam from home with the technology available to them. I’ve communicated many times that I’ll be understanding about connectivity glitches and the … Continue reading Online teaching, week two, new adventures

Well, I survived, and my students survived, and I am now officially teaching online. I’m also left too exhausted to do much more than a bullet list of events and lessons learned: Every one of my students submitted the assignment due today (originally due last Monday when we returned from break). I am so proud of them and the effort they are putting in right at the start to be engaged. Since last time I installed Java, there is a new version out, and JavaFX doesn’t appear to be part of the install, so many students were unable to do … Continue reading Zero Day: 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 … Continue reading T-minus one day to online teaching

Today was Saturday so work on my courses was sandwiched between grocery shopping in the morning and cooking meals for the week in the evening (plus a big pot of spaghetti sauce to share with my family). It was an uneventful day in preparing for my classes, which is reassuring. The new piece I added in to my repertoire was a couple of videos capturing my problem solving process as I developed a few programs from start to finish. There was a lot of switching back and forth between the problem prompt, the editor, the compilation/run window, and the API … Continue reading T-minus two days to online teaching

Today, enough pieces clicked that I have a picture of what the rest of the semester will look like. One challenge to this transition is that one of my courses is a new offering. I had a plan for the course, but I didn’t have a bank of entirely complete materials to fall back on. But I got the detailed project document for the second half of the term done and posted with its deadlines set, and things are falling into place now that I have that as a framework. I’m still structuring my content around “class days” because it … Continue reading T-minus three days to online teaching