Author: jwsepke

Hang up and…

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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.

That said, 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…

Note: This post was originally part of my previous blog entitle “Tech Life Balance.”

Virtual education – the time and place for simulations and animations

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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

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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.

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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!

The August Dance

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For many years, the first day of August brought a sound into my head.  It was like having song stuck, but wasn’t a song – just a clip of a sound.  It was the sound of Homer Simpson shrieking.  Over and Over.  And Over.

August is a crazy time for a twelve-month employee in a school.  The ten- and eleven- month-ers come back rested and full of ideas.  Forms start to come in (or worse – not come in).  Class enrollment is finalized.  The phone starts ringing and the emails start flying.  Then students and parents arrive, tablets get distributed, printers need installing, and classes begin.  August for me, no matter how prepared I seem to feel, always ends up with late nights, a panic as I realize that I’ve failed (again) to secure a birthday gift for my husband, and sending notes to friends and family that I’ll see them in September.

My last post, nearly three weeks ago, saw me at inbox zero.  But I quickly lost ground and ended up at inbox 168.  Last Saturday, I got that down to 63 only to be back at 120 by the next Tuesday.  I haven’t made it back to inbox zero, but as of now, I’m at inbox 14, which is, as my husband says, good enough for rock and roll.

Like any August, this one has been a roller coaster of activity.  My absence from this blog is just one symptom of the busy time that August brings.  But, in the last three weeks, we’ve launched the new website (which is lovely), brought two out of three migrated databases online, oriented over 80 new students to our one-to-one tablet program, started classes and so on.  I’m choosing to focus on what has been done, rather than what hasn’t.  Just don’t look for dust bunnies in the corners of my house.

While it is all still fresh, I am considering what can I do to keep August from being so crazy next year. Here are some thoughts that may work well for anyone fighting to gain Tech Life Balance (Note: This post is part of a previous blog entitled “Tech Life Balance.”)

  • Ask for help:  I suffer from the idea that I can always do it better/quicker myself and that it is better to take a burden on myself than to place one on someone else.   While I am getting better about delegation and asking for help, I still have a long way I can go.
  • Plan ahead:  It seems that for the last three weeks, each evening is about what must be done to get through the next day.  It is hard to jump off the hamster wheel and think ahead.  I have been on duty this weekend, which means that I am at work.  While a majority of others are taking a little time off, I’ve been hard at work to catch up so that I can start thinking about things that are further up my calendar, like that presentation for Friday or the faculty development session on Thursday.
  • Admit defeat if needed:  I had items on my to do list for August that are now on my to do list for October.  The didn’t have to happen and it was more important to get some sleep or check on my Mom or do a load of laundry.   When admitting defeat, be kind to yourself.  It’s not that you couldn’t do it; it’s that you chose other priorities.

So, we’ve arrived at Labor Day.  The time to put away your seersucker and white shoes and to silence the shrieking Homer in your head.  I did the best I could with this August. The craziness is over for another year.  Now, it’s time to get back to the routine days and to get back on the track in the ongoing quest for keeping it all in balance.  Starting with going for out for brunch and playing a couple of rounds of Tiger Woods Golf on the Wii.