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It’s often when you stop and think, as I’ve done in the past few weeks, that you can stumble over the most basic question. In an effort to think more clearly about the basic elements of my teaching practice, I … Continue reading →

The Artist’s Struggle Recently, I was chatting with my artist friend. In her opinion, there exist certain cultures across the

The post The story of art: the cost of exclusivity in the digital age appeared first on Blank Slate Chronicles.

Well friends….we’re almost there! It’s the end of what has undoubtedly been the strangest year of our teaching careers (to date). Collectively we’re exhausted…it’s been hard work these last three months. We’re emotional…one minute elated at seeing our students and the next minute in tears over a video of high school grads trying on dresses …

Continue reading "That’s A Wrap!"

Here is the fifth activity break that I've added to my online courses in an effort to make them healthier places to study with reminders to be active in the real world. This activity break is focused on on-the-go mindfulness, while demonstrating video SEO. Feel free to use it and modify it for your own needs.

The post Online Course Activity Break #5: Combining Mindfulness with a Lesson in Video SEO appeared first on Erica Hargreave.

Oprah's podcast series, SuperSoul Conversations, is a perfect nourishment for our souls, especially during the COVID-19 change in our lives.

The post Finding Calm, Beauty and Peace in Oprah’s Podcast Series appeared first on Ahimsa Media.

This letter on Positive Changes Coming from the June 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests was researched and written to a loved one to explain to them why the current Black Lives Matter protests and marches are needed.

The post The Power of the Protest – Positive Changes Coming from the June 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests appeared first on StoryToGo.

I’ve been working on some productivity tweaks, and with a BCcampus move to Office 365 and Teams, I’ve found myself really appreciating the seamless transition between Slack-like team spaces and synchronous meetings. I’m also loving MS Forms for survey creation, and this week I discovered Planner, the Office 365 project management Kanban tool. I dove right in and have realized that MS Office 365 is major rethink, and a significant workflow shift. But it has required some reflection about how all the productivity and workflow pieces fit together. The first thing to understand is that Teams, Planner, and to some extent Outlook are built on top of a files and document structure (Sharepoint). Thanks Anne-Marie Scott for making that visible to me. In previous ways of working, the workflow started with a document that you created on your desktop and maybe synced to a cloud. Your communication activities took place around this document as required…via email, Slack or some sort of cloud annotation (google docs). Sometimes you used multiple communication spaces defined by implicit or explicit rules – email and attachments for formal, Slack for informal, etc. As I understand it, in this new way of working your file/document structure is built out from the communication or activity space. If you are in a Team or a channel, the files becomes associated with that space. If you are in Planner, it becomes associated with the plan or the task. These activity spaces become the gateway to your files. This is both delightful and challenging to me. On the one hand, it’s nice to have the files in a collection associated with your specific activity and the communication around that activity. So you navigate to the activity space in order to find your files. On the other hand, navigating to the files the old way (via desktop or cloud space) is surprisingly opaque to me. First, the nomenclature is confusing. There’s OneNote, (which used to be a document view option in Word back in the old days called Notebook view, and it had a handy dictation feature that I still miss) that is a separate application but also available to you via Teams or Planner. There is Sharepoint where the docs you create on your desktop and then share via the Office Teams/Planner spaces seem to end up. Sharepoint is your institutional/organizational space so the photos of your pets and whatnot that you share in these channels presumably end up there? In Teams you have Notes which opens up Notebook (on Sharepoint?) but the same thing in Planner is called Notebook. But if you want to initiate it on your desktop you have to open up OneNote. If you are wanting to make sure that you are retaining your own copies on your desktop presumably you can make all of this work with OneDrive syncing – thanks D’Arcy, for that tip. Is this an improvement? For me, it’s 80% there. I’ve gained some significant efficiencies, and I like having shared docs at hand in the activity space as opposed to hunting and pecking for a google doc. In other words, I like this rethink about the activities of work teams being the central focus, of which document production is a component and for having tools available that facilitate that working together. But I think there’s work to do – or perhaps some tips to throw my way – for more transparency on the file structure and document management side.

Tajik Persian: Readings in History, Culture and Society seeks to help students develop reading proficiency in Tajik at advanced level through authentic texts written for native speakers and provides them glimpses into the history, culture and society of Tajikistan without losing its focus on cultural aspects of the country—an aspect that constitutes a core component […]

Throughout the summer, the UBC Physics and Astronomy Outreach team will be introducing physics and astronomy activities that can be easily done at home and adapted for online teaching & learning. Accompanied with extensive tutorials and detailed instruction guides, the Phenomenal Physics & Astronomy at Home program is an ideal resource for teacher candidates to […]