Faculty Focus

Before we part ways in this class, I wanted to bring up Faculty Focus. Have you heard of this site? Check it out if you haven't. They send weekly research-based articles with great ideas!

After taking EME6414, I feel like many of us are qualified to submit and write for this site!

The current article is on mindfulness in the classroom. When I taught at TCC, I would periodically impose a mindfulness practice on my students. I felt this was especially necessary on the days leading up to an exam. I would tell the class to close their eyes, free their minds of worries (bills, grades, family, etc.) and focus on their breaths. The idea is that if they can focus on one thing and release the necessary, it would then be easier to focus on the content in that day's review/lesson.

Would you try this in a face-to-face class? What about a podcast or video in an online class? 

One of the first products I made in the IS program was a video of breathing exercises! Coming full circle. :)

Using Blogger - Getting Comments?

I noticed that a lot of my classmates in EME6414 are also using blogger to generate a blogspot for the class blogging requirement. I already tweeted about this earlier in the week, but I wanted to elaborate.

So I have been using blogger for years for different blogs, but never really shared links or advertised the posts before. You can imagine that I never really got any comments. After posting for this class I was shocked to find out that I had four comments for my first post. I totally discovered this by accident when checking out my own blog. I did not automatically get a notification! 

I figured out that I have to manually set blogger to email me a notification - this was not automatic. And it wasn't intuitive to me when looking for the settings. I first looked under Comments - nope! This is what you do:

1. Go to your Blogger dashboard, then click on Settings.
2. Next, click on Mobile and email.
3. That's where you can set an email address for comment notification. Notice, you can set more than one.

I hope this helps someone. :)