Tech Life Balance

Moving

Well, readers, after 2 years this blog is moving to jessicasepke.com.   Hope to see you there.

Legacy of Being the Shy Child

I was shy. Painfully shy.  Though my mother tells me that when I was little I would pretend to be lost in the grocery store so that I could talk to people and ask them to help me find my mommy, I have no recollection of being anything but shy. 

I couldn't order my own happy meal.

If asked to speak up, I whispered.

I avoided being called on in class.

"Getting to know you" games were a personal hell.

Even through college, I didn't participate in class often.  If I worked up the nerve to speak, but answered the question wrong or had my idea rejected, I would never speak in that class again.  In one class, I would whisper my questions to a friend and she would ask them; until one day she raised her hand and loudly announced that I had a question for the teacher. Any question that I had was lost in an overwhelming desire to sink into the floor and disappear from the 23 pairs of eyes that turned around to see what that question I was going to ask.

In small groups of friends and co-workers, I was fine - soft-spoken but funny and thoughtful. But raise the number of people to more than 3 and my palms would sweat.  I would get tongue-tied and nauseated.  It was awful. Awkward. Limiting. Horrid.

Then I became a teacher.  Then the technology director.  Then I started a one-to-one tablet PC program.  I talked in front of my students.  I trained groups of faculty.  I spoke to groups of over 500 with grace and a wicked sense of humor.  I volunteered to be the opening convocation speaker.   It was a true transformation.

But lately, I've noticed that I still live with the legacy of being a shy child.   I want to feel like I have something really valuable to say before I say it.  I don't speak up often in meetings unless I know that I have a real contribution to make.  But the biggest legacy of spending two-thirds of my life in the shadow of shyness is that social media is hard.  Really hard.

I'm on Facebook, but I'm more likely to "like" than post a status.  I'm on twitter, but I'm not sure if what I have to say is valuable.  I have a blog, but am averaging less than a post/month.  

At first, I thought that this was just because I lead a crazy-busy life, but now, I think it's the legacy of being the shy child.  Parents at my school tell me that they always look forward to my segment of the opening assembly. Co-workers tell me that they love when it is my turn to speak because I'm concise and hilarious.  What I can't figure out yet is how to recreate the transformation from shy student to comfortable public speaker into the realm of social media.  Suggestions anyone?  I'll be over here sitting in the back of the twitter feed trying to hide behind the tall kid...

Inbox Zero - a week later

I love Inbox Zero.  Elation is the only work that I think I can use that comes close to describing the feeling of seeing my inbox totally empty.   Two weekends ago, I posted "my own personal failblog" from a fog of feeling overwhelmed and tired.  Last weekend, I took the bull by the horns and spend two days ruthlessly clearing my inbox.  I started Saturday morning around 7:30 and Sunday afternoon around 4:30, I hit inbox zero.   Disclaimer - I slept, ate, did laundry, and located a roll of masking tape my husband needed.

So, a week later, it's Sunday again.  Guess what!  The inbox is still empty.  It has been empty each night for a week.  It can be done.   And, in case you are wondering, I received 396 emails this week.

So, how did I manage that?   Back to David Allen's Getting Things Done and a few simple rules. 

1. Do it now.  Different people use different numbers for how long a "do it now" task is - usually 1-3 mintues.  I don't really put a number on it, just "a few."
2. Stop procrastinating.  I had gotten particularly bad at putting off tasks for all manner of reasons.  I didn't have enough time on had to do it right.  I was stuggling with how to handle that email response.   I needed to write but was having a low-creativity day.  I needed information I didn't have.  I was waiting for someone to be back from vacation.   Now - do it, delegate it or schedule it.
3. No "To Do's" in the inbox.  If it is in the inbox, you have to think about it every time you open the inbox.  If it is a to do, either do it or get it into the tasks list and scheduled do be done. 

So, I've managed a week with these rules helping me to keep an empty inbox.  Its a really nice feeling.  I've actually gotten to the end of my emails and my tasks a couple of times this week and found myself looking forward on my list to see if there's anything I can do in advance.   I'm pretty sure that wasn't possible two weeks ago.  Let's see how long I can keep this thing going. 

 

My Own Personal FailBlog

I'm a fan of failblog and the rest of the cheezburger network.  Sometimes funny pictures of cats really can make your day better.  However, I'm not referring to this failblog, but to this post as being my confession of failing at my blog. 

If you read the previous post, you may notice that I last posted on 6/10/10, just four days short of a FULL YEAR AGO.   Really?   I haven't had anything to say for a FULL YEAR?   For any of you who know me, you know that this is not remotely possible.   Not at all.

What happened a year ago?  I went on a few trips and I got a promotion that added a new department to my area of responsibility.  And I fell off the blog wagon.  About three months after that, I fell off the balance wagon.  I stopped working out consistently.  I stopped being careful about what I ate.  I stopped cooking.  I stopped spreading housework through the week and ended up doing it on weekends.  I stopped stopping at a reasonable time at night, checking email and working into the evening and night.  I stopped staying connected to my personal learning network on Twitter.   You can't write a "tech life balance" blog if you're really lacking in tech life balance, now can you?

So, here's my failblog confession.   I failed to blog and I failed at the purpose of the blog.  I forgive me.

In the words of Thomas Edison,  “I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work."   Maybe I haven't found 10,000 ways that don't work, but I have found a number of things that don't make me feel like I'm as happy and balanced as I want to be.  

Now, I've come back to this blog and to taking time to consider the questions that I designed this blog. 

I just hope I can stay on the wagon this time. 

Responding to Alan November

This week at Lenovo's ThinkTank 2010, I had an opportunity to hear from Alan November.  I have long admired Alan's forward-thinking examinations of learning in an environment where technology is increasingly available and essential.  I've spent a couple of days thinking about some of the things that Alan said in our session and want to share these thoughts.

One thing that Alan suggested is that one should listen to Eric Mazur and I'm doing that now. The reason that this came up is the idea that no amount of good teaching can overcome the preexisting misconceptions that students have before.  To overcome these preexisting misconceptions you must first be aware of them.  Then, you must address them directly so that the students can "unlearn" that wrong information.  Last, you can now teach new ideas.  

I'm lucky in that, as I return to teaching only AP Computer Science, my students don't have a lot of misconceptions about the material because very few of them have ever programmed before.  The only misconception that they are likely to come with is either that the class will be very hard or that it will be fun and easy.   (The truth of course is that the class is fun and hard).  

So, I'm watching "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer: Eric Mazur."  Eric discovered that his carefully prepared lectures were not actually resulting in his students learning the material he was teaching.  He came to the conclusion that he needed to shift from "teaching" to "helping" his students and to letting them help each other.  

Back to Alan November's talk.  In this talk, Alan said that homework was a stupid idea.  You give a student some problems to do.  The student does the problems.  Let's say that the student gets 10 problems wrong.  He adopts this concept of how to do these problems and then turns in the problems.  A couple of days may pass before he knows that they are wrong and at this point, he has completely absorbed the incorrect idea of how to do the problem.  Alan proposed that the homework needs to be the classwork and the classwork becomes the homework.  What might this look like?  The students read or watch the lecture for homework.  They interact with each other online or respond in a way that allows the teacher to identify their misconceptions.  The teacher can then use class time to call attention to the misconceptions and by identifying them, begin to "unteach" them.  Class now becomes a time for the students to interact with each other, solve problems, and collaborate.  Using automatic response tools throughout the class, the teacher can identify how the class is doing progressing toward understanding the concept.  The teacher can direct students who solve a problem correctly to assist students who are having difficulty.  The time with the teacher becomes about action and interaction.

I've been thinking a lot about how this might apply to my AP Computer Science class in the upcoming year.  The class has eight students, which seems small from an outside perspective, but in my particular school this is a huge AP Comp class.  How can I make the classwork into homework and the homework into classwork?

First, I learned awhile back that the more I have students read from the textbook, either before or after the lecture, the more confused the students become.  In the last two years, I have stopped assigning required reading; all reading is supplemental and optional.  So, I don't want to assign readings from the text to make the classwork into homework.  I'm going to start out by looking at MIT's Open Course Ware to see what video can be assigned as part of our required summer work.  I had success creating youtube videos for my Honors Chemistry class last year, so if I don't find material I like, I can create my own.

Second, according to Alan's experience, when students feel that their classmates are depending on them, they will do more than if they are doing the work only for themselves.  I have had classes work collaboratively to work on wikis to create study guides, but I want to take this further and I have to think about how to do this. 

Lastly, my classes have always done a lot of group programming, but I'm always the scribe.  It's time to put the kids in control of the screen and let them solve the problems collaboratively for themselves. 

So, I'm hoping to use the summer assignment for my AP Comp class to test this idea of switching the homework and the classwork.  Then, when I have my students in the classroom, I'm going to try to sit down and shut up a little more often.

Back to Basics

I recently reached a place of distinct frustration.  I am not good at balance, which is why I started this blog (and also why there are sometimes entire seasons of the year that I don't post).  I caught myself complaining recently to my husband that after putting 14 hours a day into work, I spent weekends cleaning, grocery shopping, running errands, and doing laundry.   Maybe whining is a better description than complaining.  I had gotten myself stuck in a rut.  I wasn't exercising.  I wasn't planning and cooking healthy meals.  I wasn't taking time for myself often enough.  Time that should have been spent on these things was all about work (and not just in the sense of my job, but in the sense of tasks that must be completed).  And worst of all, I was feeling sorry for myself for being "stuck" in that situation.

Realizing that I was the only one who could change my situation, I decided it was time to go back to basics.  Last week was a "light" week at school because we had co-curricular programming, but no classes.  I made a point of working out each day.  My husband or I cooked dinner each night.  I went to the Pullen pottery studio even though I didn't have class.  And, I made the chore chart. 

I mentioned the chore chart to a colleague yesterday who reminded me that "that's what we do for the kids."  Absolutely.  And apparently we now have to do it for me.  Each day contains a 15 minute chore for me, a 15 minute chore for my husband, and a load of laundry.  We implemented the plan through last week and it worked beautifully.  We arrived at the weekend with a mostly clean house (as clean as it can be when you have a cat who, based on the number of cat-hair tumble weeds under the bed, should be bald) and were able to relax much more than in most weekends. 

Try your own chore chart for whatever tasks you find yourself putting off, avoiding, or resenting.  Share the wealth with your family members.  And, check out Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project.  Gretchen spent a year learning to be happier by testing many theories of happiness and finding what worked for her.  One thing I learned from following Gretchen's project was that you are who you are.  Take the time to be introspective and find out what makes you happy.  If that means that your drummer doesn't match other people's, that's okay. 

So, this week it's back to a normal work week.  We'll see how well I can do with continuing to exercise, cook, and follow the chore chart.  It's Monday at 8:15 a.m. and so far, I remembered to take the chicken out of the freezer for dinner tonight.  It's a start.

Hang up and...

Once, in college, I was given a tiara.  I was given the title "Queen of Multitasking."  It was a very small ceremony and the tiara was made of carbon atoms from my Organic Chem molecule building kit.  So, know before you read the rest of this that I have been known to multitask.  Often.  I once gave a full AP Computer Science tutorial while working out at the school gym on an elliptical machine.  I kid you not.

I really want people to hang up.  You do not need to be using a cell phone at all times.   

I saw a guy biking down a fairly busy street the other day.  He was texting.  With both hands.  He clearly has better balance than I do, but this just seems unwise.

A few weeks ago, I waited several minutes to get cheddar slices at Target.  Why? Because the woman standing in front of the cheese was on the phone oblivious to the polite attempts of others to reach the cheese. This trend continued in the cleaning products and in produce.  If you want to shop with a friend, bring her with you.  Or better yet, go have coffee and leave the grocery store to those of us who can fill our carts and be out in less than 20 minutes.

Other places that your shouldn't be on the phone:

Fitting Rooms:  Being trapped in a cubicle with fluorescent lighting and then having to listen to you talk about your hernia is adding insult to injury.

The bathroom: Seriously.  No one wants to talk to you while you do your business.  No one. 

In Line:  Any line at all.  I do not want to listen to the details of your argument with your friend, husband, wife, neighbor, co-worker, boss, cat, dog or potted plant.

Stores:  While shopping, phone calls should be limited to one of the three following calls:

1. "Honey, was I supposed to get apple juice and oranges or orange juice and apples?"  "Okay. Thanks. Bye"
2. "Can I call you back in 15 minutes?"  "Okay. Thanks. Bye."  
3. "You have a wrong number." "Okay. Thanks. Bye."

Restaurants: Just eat.  You talk with your mouth full when you're on the phone.  You think you don't, but you do.

Bonus rudeness points to anyone talking on a speaker phone in public.

And to quote my husband, "If I have to think, 'hang up and walk,' you're doing something wrong."

So, what does my rant have to do with tech life balance?  Tech isn't life.  Needing to be connected all the time isn't balance.  Simple daily tasks can just happen.  Save your multitasking for when you're not disturbing others.  

Hang up and...

Virtual education - the time and place for simulations and animations

At NCAIS Innovate this year NCAIS unveiled their Virtual School.  The backchannel chat on twitter raised a lot of questions and one that I found most interesting was what is the role of the virtual, mainly simulations and animations, in education. 

For those who might be new to this blog, my first love was science.  I majored in biology and minored in chemistry at WFU.  While in high school at NCSSM, I completed two independent research projects during my senior year.  The lab was a big part of my life for many years.  I love the smell. I love the tools (cryostat, centrifuge, pipets, electrophoresis just to name a few favorites).  I love the way that the lab makes science real.  You can see things and prove things to yourself.  You can connect to the universe and its secrets.

In becoming a chemistry teacher, I've found labs can be a simultaneous blessing and curse.  Labs are essential to teach science.  Students need to get their hands dirty and see the science work.  They need to learn how to collect and analyze data.  Unfortunately, labs are time consuming.  Sometimes they fail and confuse students rather than clarify concepts.  It is difficult to get students to understand that results are results, not right or wrong.  They might be expected or unexpected and their might be a source of error that has skewed them, but they are what they are. 

In a world of virtual education one can't necessarily do labs.  Students working at home don't necessarily have the resources to dissect a frog, perform an acid-base titration, or measure the frequencies of sounds.  So, where is the happy medium for the virtual in science? 

I think that it is in supplements and in visualizations.   Below are a two examples that I feel represent the best of the use of the virtual in science education. 

Titration Simulation - http://www.chem.iastate.edu/group/Greenbowe/sections/projectfolder/flashfiles/stoichiometry/acid_base.html

I used this simulation as a follow up to the hands-on titration lab my students did.  Titration is tricky, because it is so easy to overshoot the equivalence point and miss your chance to record the correct data.  Several groups struggled with this aspect of the experiment.  On the next day, we needed to demonstrate how to complete the calculations that go along with titration.  Using this simulation let us review how the experiment works and then complete the calculations.  For homework students used it again to try an experiment on their own and turned in their assignment by sending me a screenshot of their completed "experiment" and correct answer.   One of the best things about this simulation is that it provides a lot of choices to the students with regard to which acids, bases, and indicators they use.  It also lets them complete the calculations and check their answer.  The only thing that this simulation lacks is a review of how to do the calculations themselves if your initial answer is wrong. 

Buffer Animation - http://www.mhhe.com/physsci/chemistry/essentialchemistry/flash/buffer12.swf

One of the challenges of teaching chemistry is that students need to visualize things that are happening on the atomic level.  This particular animation was very helpful in helping my students understand how buffers function.  You can explain and draw the chemicals and their atoms on the board all day, but seeing the motion of this animation made a huge difference for my students.

As the NCAIS Virtual School and others like it develop, I'm sure much more will be learned about how students can use the virtual to understand scientific concepts.  In the meantime, I'll be looking for more examples like these that can be used for preview, reinforcement and practice.

Fall Back, Spring Forward

Tomorrow night marks this year's entry into Daylight Saving's Time.   This post is about falling back and springing forward, but the relationship to daylight savings ends there.

This fall, I gave new meaning to "Fall Back."  I set the clock back an hour, but you might also notice that my last post was at the beginning of my school's Fall Break.  In realizing that I "fell back," I'm thinking about my five month hiatus from this blog, twitter, nings, and most other sources of professional interaction and growth.  I fell of the balance train and right back in to my long established bad habits surrounding work/life balance. 

Now, it's time to spring forward.  As I write this, I am five hours into my school's Spring Break, but that's not the cause of this return to the blogosphere.

This week, I spent two days at the NCAIS Innovate conference.  I feel refreshed.  I feel thoughtful.  I feel pretty, oh so... oh wait, that's West Side Story.  

For two days, I attended workshops, shared ideas, tweeted constantly, met people I'd only known online, and generally had time to think outside the to do list.   It was amazing and it reminded me that by allowing myself to disengage in the name of "being soooo busy," I hadn't really gained anything.  I had lost out on growth.

My to do list is longer today than it was yesterday, both because things happened while I was away that must be handled and because I have so many new ideas, new blogs to read, and new connections to nurture.  But a few more to do's are okay.  I'm committing to springing forward into engagement.  I will stay connected.  I will remember the importance of being present in the community of educators.  I will remember that if the small things fill the days, weeks and months, that the big things will never fit.

In the last five months, I have discovered new tools and techniques for my classes.  I've made my first youtube videos and given an lab assessment for a semester exam rather than a traditional pencil and paper test, just to name two.  I'll be back soon to share these with you.  I'll also share some further thoughts on some of the great ideas and presentations that I saw at NCAIS innovate.  But for now, it's time to sign off, unplug, and get spring break started with a movie. 

Goodbye, August. Hello, October.

I'm not sure where September went this year.  I just know it went quickly and the balance train ran me over.  But, in the last few days, I feel that things are returning to "normal."  In other words, August is over and it is actually October now.  As you read in my last post, August is a hectic time for school folks. August doesn't end with the calendar saying September 1.  August ends when the rush of back to school changes to the steady pace of the school year. 

So, what have I learned from this year's extended August?  Two new email techniques have been added to my arsenal: categories and deferring.

Outlook 2007 has categories that can be used for calendar items or emails. I've never really used them for anything other than contacts and then it was just for tagging people to whom I send holiday cards.  Next, I started using them to tag tasks.  A red square (Category WF for "waiting for..." ) beside a task means that I can't move forward on this particular task until someone gets me something that I've asked for.  The waiting for list is another of the techniques from David Allen's Getting Things Done.  Yes, I'm sure you're spotting a theme in this blog.  It's all about the GTD.  Anyway, there are several main topics of email that arrive on most days right now.  One is questions from staff members about the new databases we implemented this summer.  Another is items to be added to our new website or questions about its ongoing development.  A third is questions from parents or students about accessing the web or the database.  After those, there's everything else.  As the amount of incoming email became more than I could clear in a day, I started using categories: "Parent/Student Question," "Database" and "Web" joined the "WF" category.  By coding messages, I was able to deal with them in batches, ignoring the category that I wasn't working with at the time and not re-touching the message over and over.  This has proven to be an incredibly helpful technique and has kept important questions and requests from slipping off my radar in the sea of incoming items.

I don't know about you, but I've always had that little stack of messages at the bottom of my email inbox that I just wasn't ready to answer yet.  Not because they were in the "WF" category, but because I needed to think about them or decide what my weekend plan was.  Each time I scanned through my inbox, these messages sat at the bottom, mocking me for my inability to clear that box.  Then I discovered the "Defer" button on the ClearContext toolbar.  Click the bottom, set a time, and the message disappears until that time.  Know that you can't reply to that dinner invitation until after you see next week's schedule?  Defer.  Not ready to decide whether you want to take advantage of the most recent offer from a vendor? Defer.  Simple. Elegant. Useful. 

Now, Fall Break has arrived and I'm breathing a sigh of relief.  My inbox isn't empty, but it only has a 10 items in it and I can relax for a few days.  Things have been crazy and busy, and at times a little overwhelming, but I have two new techniques to manage the flow of information.  This can only make it easier to find a little tech/life balance.  Happy Fall Break!