Lisa Sieverts

Teachers, how many of you get to the end of your course and find yourself wanting to completely revamp it for the next semester, thereby losing all of the economies of scale you’ve earned by creating great materials?LOL.

Also on team sourdough

Hey, it’s almost May and I’m almost done teaching for the year. One more webinar (we’re always in Zoom so it’s nothing new), a few more papers to grade, and then it’s over. I’ll spend time at the end of May putting the course to bed so it’s easy to pick it back up in January.

Today I’m grateful for a day of sunshine. It’s still late winter in New Hampshire. Snow on the ground yesterday morning. No daffodils blooming yet. But sunshine today. Rain for the next three days. And then perhaps warmth.

I feel very lucky to have more work in this time of coronavirus than I had before. But unfortunately, that has led to a resurgence of a repetitive stress injury in my arms. I’m experimenting with voice control on my Mac. So far it’s working surprisingly well. In the distant past, I was a Dragon user, so the various oddnesses of dictation are somewhat familiar. The struggle is re-learning how to think via my voice instead of via my fingers.

I’m grateful for paid work. My main gig disappeared and then came back in a different form. My other gig went from having a fun face-to-face teaching weekend to having 14 hours in Zoom. I’m working on making it fun. And I made sourdough popovers. Yum.

I teach online a lot. I’m good at it. But I’ve just been tasked with moving a highly interactive 3-day class weekend from face-to-face to online. I’m embracing the challenge! Here’s a resource which has good information: bocoup.com/blog/remo…

Grateful that my teaching day 1 of 4-day PMP training is complete, and truly looking forward to sleeping

Normally, I avoid conspiracy theories. But I find myself saying “I think Trump had Jamal Khashoggi and Jeffrey Epstein killed, and that Lev Parnas is talking in order to try to stay alive.”

Grateful to my last year’s self who left really good notes about how to run the first webinar for my course. Looking forward to fresh snow tomorrow and an English Country Dance.

Last day of PMP Prep teaching. Grateful for a focused and interested group of students, looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight.

Sleeping in a hotel, getting ready to teach a project management workshop for the next 4 days. Grateful for weirdly warm weather, looking forward to normal winter weather coming back.

So today I’m grateful for neighbors with extra salmon and I’m looking forward to an easy drive to Boston tomorrow.

That nice feeling when the neighbor calls and says “we just cooked salmon for Alouette and now she can’t come over so do you want to have dinner with us?” The New England weather was so weirdly warm that I walked over to their house without wearing a coat.

Sad about dropping my brother off at the airport but happy that we had three fine days skiing together. I’m grateful for sibling companionship and am looking forward to skiing in Maine in 5 weeks.

Fun ski day with my brother. Grateful to dad who put us on skis 50+ years ago. Then we watched The Mandalorian. I loved it so much more than Rise of Skywalker.

Fought my way through a new Earned Value example. Even though I’m agileLisa, I teach PMP prep classes (Project Management Professional) from time to time. Didn’t like the example in our book but now I have a new one all prepped. #win

Sunday workday. The only difference from a Monday was that I slept late. It’s all worth it though, as I’ll be skiing on Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Up late with the local contra dance. But I gave my notice that I want to stop being the dance organizer this year. I’m just old and tired.

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.