Lisa Sieverts

Reading in January 2020 📚

Westside by W.M. Akers

Today was the day I figured out I don’t have a spare moment until February. The good news is that part of that is because I’m committed to skiing once a week. But jeez. Time management to the rescue, I suppose.

No work, all play today. Skiing on a beautiful blue sky day. One of the perks of self-employment.

Hello, world, again. I’d like to actually write in micro.blog this year. January 1 seems as good a time to begin as any other day. #WorkingOutLoud Today I recorded my 8th screencast for my Agile course. I’m in a fever of prep, trying to record one screencast a day. Most of these are re-records of screencasts I made 2-3 years ago when I first “flipped” my classroom. I have a better mic now, I have a better sense of what I’m doing, and all my old ones look dated and tired. My big accomplishment of the week so far has been finally figuring out Screenflow callouts.

It’s 8 PM and I finished teaching our first webinar about 50 minutes ago. There were 32 students present: 29 registered and all 3 from the wait list. That’s a lot to manage in a Zoom webinar but after 3 years, and working with the same invaluable TA for the whole time, we did it. It felt like a very successful class. Students were lively and engaged. Our Zoom breakout went well. Everyone seems excited about the semester. Whew!

Tools used: Zoom on Mac, Zoom in iPad, Google Docs, Canvas, Yellowdig, Chrome

As of today, my Canvas course is open to students. I’ve published the first two assignments: their biography and my new “Quiz 0” which is a prompt to read and understand the syllabus and rubrics.

Speaking of rubrics, I rewrote all four of my rubrics in HTML so that it would be easy to copy and paste into Canvas. BBEdit and Marked2 made this process very easy.

My enrollment has been hovering right around 30, which is the maximum allowed. As of today, the course is full with two on the wait list.

I can’t wait to meet all of the new students! I love this process where we go from not knowing each other to knowing each other fairly well.

Yesterday, I opened up my Canvas site to registered students and I sent an email to all 32 of them (30 maximum, 2 on the waitlist). I have no idea if all my emails went in to spam folders, but at least I’ve done my part to remind students of the work they need to do before the course begins.

As I mentioned in my last post, the big news of the week was the decision to go back to software called Yellowdig for online discussion. The most important thing for me is that our discussions are lively and community-building. While Yellowdig is not perfect, it seems to be better suited to my needs than the other options available to me.

Because I don’t have enough on my plate (not!), I decided to try out MailMate as my email platform. I have about ten email addresses and it can be tricky keeping up with all of them. So far so good with MailMate. I like the plain text/Markdown aspect of it.

Tools used: MailMate, Canvas, Yellowdig

Today I received a good reminder that it’s always good to do testing in advance.

My online courses always have a discussion component. In the past, I used the built-in Forum capability of our Learning Management System, Canvas. Last year, I used a new tool called Yellowdig.

This year, I was planning to try another new tool called Notebowl, but I’ve figured out that it does not allow any editing of posts after saving. As someone who makes lots of typos herself and often edits and re-saves her micro.blog posts 5 times (even though I write them in Ulysses first and supposedly don’t post them to micro.blog until they are “final”), I felt that this behavior would cause undue frustration for my students. The point of discussion in my course is to have a social learning environment, with plenty of sharing. If everyone has to get each post perfect before saving, I think that would reduce the “ease” of our discussion.

So I’ve ditched Notebowl and we’ll use Yellowdig again this year.

I attended a webinar from our Educational Technology group last week. The topic was “Getting Students to Read Your Syllabus.” One recommendation was to create an online quiz, where the questions are all easily answered by reading the syllabus. For me, this means questions like “When are assignments due?” Answer: Sunday at 10 PM

So I spent some time today creating an online quiz in Canvas. I’m up to 16 questions, might make it all the way to 20 by the time the course begins. I’ll be interested to see student feedback on this quiz.

I also updated the Syllabus to match the quiz questions. I’m very happy that I made the investment of time over the summer to write my Syllabus in Markdown. My master document is in BBEdit. I use Marked 2 to get HTML from the Markdown version, and then it’s totally simple to paste the HTML into Canvas. Canvas is a nightmare as an editing platform so it’s best to do all the edits elsewhere.

Tools in use today were Canvas Quizzes, iThoughts, BBEdit and Marked 2.

Didn’t get any course preparation done today. Started off with a useful and interesting gathering of coaches and consultants at our local business incubator. We’ve decided to meet monthly, with a focus on one of our businesses each time. The presenter will describe their business AND either teach us a tool or share a case study. That way, we learn each other’s businesses as well as something useful and new.

This first week of the year has been all about learning that I have to do my hard work in the morning. I’ve heard other people say it and I’ve always discounted the idea. But I watched myself this past year, tracking my time using a wheel that I first saw here on micro.blog. The facts don’t lie so I’ve set a resolution to do the hard work in the morning and save the easy stuff for afternoon.

Yesterday I worked from the end of the course toward the middle. Today I worked from the beginning of the course toward the middle. There’s still a bit of a black hole at the center but I’m getting to the point where I can see all sixteen weeks in my head.

I’m remembering the experiments I thought about last year that I want to try this year. I’m grateful to my year-ago self for the notes I took: “In 2019, do A, try B, and don’t do C.”

I’m excited that there are still four weeks to go. I could start teaching tomorrow if I had to, but the extra time means I can build a strong and flexible structure.

Tools in use today were Canvas (our Learning Management System), Keynote, and Curio.

My course has one additional webinar this year, so today I focused on refreshing my memory about all of the pieces of the course that I want to be sure to include. I’m finding Curio to be so valuable. It has an infinite canvas so I can keep adding to my visual picture of the course as I think of another part that I want represented.

I’ve always had a visual representation of the course. It’s evolved from mind maps to Scapple to Trello and now to Curio. I like Curio best — it provides me with the tools I need without forcing me into any specific layout.

Goal for tomorrow: fill up the “hole” that is Webinar 6, now that I understand everything that leads up to and follows it.

Yes, I have a New Years Resolution to write and publish to micro.blog on each weekday in January. I’ll be documenting the project of preparing to teach Agile Project Management at Harvard Extension for the fourth time. The course begins on January 30.

It is a gift to be able to teach the same course more than once. In my experience, the first time ends up being a rough draft, no matter how much time you put into preparation. The second time gets you to the point where you say “OK, now I know what this is supposed to look like, the outline is clear, the activities are working and we’re all learning successfully.” After the third time, you have the confidence to make changes, take more risks, and have more fun.

Today I finalized the syllabus, and set up but did not publish the detail pages for the first two units of the course (basically the first month). Tools used: BBEdit to maintain the markdown version of the syllabus, Marked 2 to convert it to HTML, Canvas to publish course material, Google Spreadsheets for the detailed course schedule, and Curio for deep planning.

How do folks figure out what to write about? I’m thinking about making my NaNoWriMo project be to simply post something on micro.blog once a day in November. But jeez, writing is such a struggle. Oh, here’s a photo.

Currently reading: Accelerate by Forsgren, Kim, Humble 📚

Thinking about planning out my Agile class. This is year 4 for me at this school, so it’s time for some significant changes. There’s a lot that I like from prior years, but I feel that there is enough room in the schedule to add in some new material. For my planning process this year, I used Curio, a visual planning app for the Mac. Even though I know the importance of a picture when communicating the overall structure of a project, I was surprised at how helpful it was to make this picture. I’m sure it will be too small to view, but I’m doing this to share the method, not the details. Color, text, boxes. I went through many iterations of laying out the course in different ways. The end result seems so obvious, but there were 4 significant changes to the structure and schedule of the course before I arrived at this one. Of course, since it is an Agile course, I fully understand that things may change over the semester. But I am so grateful to have had the time in August to do this deep thinking about the course so that once it begins in January, I’m ready to roll.

Morning walk yesterday #nofilter. Loving these end of summer days in New England. 📷

I was a guest on a podcast yesterday. Listening to it today, I am pleasantly surprised at how cogent I sound. My years of Toastmaster training have successfully eliminated most “filler words,” that is, the ahs and ums that can be so annoying to the listener. In addition, when I am knowledgeable about the subject, it’s easy to put together complete sentences. In many ways, I would rather speak my ideas than write them. Hence the goal of making myself write and making myself publish something (anything!) regularly.

The money part comes into it because I know that by remaining invisible on the larger Internet, I am diminishing my chances of obtaining great work. I seek work where I can assist others — specifically to teach skills that make work easier and less stressful — while not adding unduly to my own stress.

Hanging out in Vermont 📷

View from the train while passing NYC 📷

That New York mix of old and new at St. Patrick’s 📷

Seated at the show no one has heard of: Molasses in January. It’s about the Great Molasses Flood that took place about a century ago in Boston. Somehow these folks have made a musical about the event … 📷

Eclair on my NYC day 📷

A day in NYC! This country mouse is looking forward to a day of eating well, gawking at skyscrapers, and catching a show no one has heard of – Molasses in January.

Breakfast at Blue State Coffee. I’m in Boston for a Project Management Institute gathering for Chapter leaders. PMs are an odd, often introverted, bunch, and they are my tribe. I learned a lot at this Region 3 summit.