Friends and colleagues,
I’m exploring offering Zoom-based Technology for Academics online workshops as a professional development opportunity. Each workshop would be limited to 10 to 15 participants, be no longer than 60 to 90 minutes including hands-on practice time, and would feature a tool especially useful to instructors.
For example, one workshop—Grading Hacks #1—would be an introduction to the text expander, Phrase Express. Using this tool to create keyboard shortcuts for long words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that you use frequently will greatly reduce the time it takes you to reply to email and to mark student assignments. By the end of the workshop, you will have created several such shortcuts.
Grading Hacks #2 would cover clipboard managers. Between Phrase Express and a good clipboard manager, the time it takes you to score student assignments will be much less than the time it is taking you now. And the quality of your feedback will be better.
Inbox Zero: Getting There and Staying There would provide you with step-by-step instructions that will clear the thousands of messages out of your inbox by the end of the 60-minute workshop. And you will get to try out some strategies that will keep it that way.
For managing pdfs and citations, another workshop could feature Mendeley.
For tracking changes you would like to make to your courses, Trello and Inoreader work great together, so a workshop would get you set up with those.
If any of these workshops sound interesting to you—or if you have ideas for other workshops—please complete this 3-question form.
Thanks!
