After a long time away (and the year of all years), I’m happy to reenter this space to reflect a bit on some of the teaching tips and tricks that have gotten me through this past year, and especially on those that will continue to be useful after we’ve returned back to in-person teaching (or some type of hybrid teaching). One of my favorite tools I’ve adopted this year is Google’s Jamboard. Jamboard provides a collaborative digital whiteboard platform, with tools to add sticky notes, text, images, and free-form drawing. It’s free to use, and just requires a Google account
An Equitable Transition to Online Learning – Flexibility, Low Bandwidth, Cell Phones, and more
Discussions about temporarily converting our face-to-face courses to an online environment have been circling both my university and the larger academic community in the past few weeks. As large institutions like UW, Stanford, and Princeton prepare to make these shifts, it’s likely to expect that other colleges and universities will follow suit. The first suggestions I heard for this shift were those of operating a large lecture or discussion class via Zoom, synchronous with the time the class usually would have met. Foremost on mind then have been questions of equity. What if some students (or faculty) don’t have access
