Adjuncts Teaching Adjuncts

I am an adjunct technical instructor at a community college in Lincoln Nebraska. I have been an adjunct for over 18 years now, in several different states. What I’ve noticed in general is that most community college instructors are experts in their fields, and they have a sincere desire to teach what they do to others.

Their only weakness is that they are not necessarily trained educators. Training is typically achieved through being informally mentored with a more experienced faculty member in their department, maybe sitting in on one or two other classes, and/or maybe taking hit-and-miss short professional workshops that address teaching issues throughout the year. Adjuncts also frequently have to fit all this training into their free time, which gets squeezed in between their primary work and their adjunct teaching.

So I see adjuncts as the glass-half-full. The full part—the water—is their subject matter knowledge. Lots of great stuff there. The empty part—which can vary in volume—reflects their teaching skills.

So my focus this year is to share ideas and tools that could be useful for other adjuncts to think about incorporating into their teaching—and thus adding to the full part of the glass.

Some time ago I gave a series of talks to faculty and staff at my community college about using wikis and/or blogs as another teaching aid. There was a lot of interest, but every once in a while someone would bring up concerns about copyright or intellectual property issues.

I found a site that might appeal to some of us to address that area. Copyscape is a free online plagiarism checker. Just enter your page's URL. And it will search the Web for word-for-word reproductions. It will even highlight the copied text.

http://www.copyscape.com/

It also allows you to include a graphical notification on your web site that you are using this feature.

New Years Resolutions

I'm normally one of those people who avoids New Years Reservations like the plague. But I'm going to try something new this year.

I'm always trying to find that ultimate successful long-term strategy to help me keep learning new ideas. I figured if the list of things to do was so short and so sweet so as to not be intimidating, I just might have a chance at actually being successful at it. For the past 6 months, I've experimented with a little post-it note on my desk. I called it my "to do" list.

My goal was to watch something new for 10 minutes, read something new for 10 minutes, do something new for 10 minutes, and write something new for 10 minutes, each work day. I must confess, this simple little post-it note inspired me to start drinking my morning coffee in front of my computer while I attempted to become human. After all, I'm not fit to interact with humans until I've had at least 2 cups of coffee in me anyways. That gives me plenty of time to work at this list. The strategy actually worked for me—early morning hours are when I am freshest. Of course, I couldn't boast a faithful 5 days a week—I considered myself lucky if I accomplished these once a week.

So this year, I'm going to change my criteria just a little:

My modified goal will be to watch something new for 15 minutes, read something new for 15 minutes, do something new for 15 minutes, and write something new for 15 minutes, each week.
If I do each of these once a week, say for 40 weeks this year, that gives me a full 40 hours of voluntary learning time. (It also leaves me plenty of time off for holidays, vacations, conferences, etc. without feeling guilty.) Right now that seems pretty doable! Of course, it is only the first week of January...

Community Clips

I just found the coolest free feature from Microsoft Office Labs. It's called Community Clips, and it allows you to download a free video recorder for Microsoft products.

Community Clips

This sure comes in handy for people like me. I downloaded and installed it in less than 2 minutes. Then I loaded up Excel and recorded my first session. The audio is not all that good, but I didn't even have my mike connected!

Here's my first try, no training, no prep, no nothing! The file format is .wmv. This was a whopping 3 mb file.

Here is my second try--this time you can view the video larger at the host site:

Working with the Access Navigation Bar

When the window opens, just click Switch to Full Screen at the top of the video!

Starting a Conversation

This week the SCC faculty and staff community will begin having a real conversation about the potential of blogs and wikis as aids in our classrooms. I'm hoping each and every person who attends the initial sessions will come and visit and share their perceptions. While not all of us can or even need to incorporate these technologies in our classes, we at least need to be better aware of them.

In the initial workshop in August, several handouts were made available. These are now listed here:

7 things you should know about wikis

7 things you should know about blogs

7 things you should know about facebook

They all come from the Educause Learning Initiative website, which is a great web resource for those of us who are always trying to play "catch up" with technology.

I look forward to comments!

Publishing from Word 2007

It seems Word 2007 has a menu command specifically to help publish blog entries.

1. In Word, go to the Microsoft Office Button and choose New.
   
2. Under the Installed Templates category, choose New Blog Post.
   
3. You will be prompted to register, and it's as simple as that!
   

Found a great online site this week for teaching resources again: it's the Faculty Innovation Center from the University of Texas at Austin. Great stuff! You can click the image below to see the topics more clearly!