Instructional Designer Sharing

This was great! We all know there are so many different ways of learning, you all provided a variety of useful tools and why you like them! It was great to see the variety of ways that all of you keep current in your fields and manage your time. I saw somethings that look like they will be helpful for me and ways to find other information that will help me work more effectively.

I really like the idea of using the Science Friday Island in Second life as an assignment. However, I can't find a schedule of topics anywhere on their page, Talk of the nation's page or NPR's page. I would want to send them when there would be a topic pertinent to the specific class. I sent an email & will post if I get a response.

Time management is a huge issue in teaching lab classes at the community college level. All my classes are lab classes. I teach 3 classes. Each class I teach is 3 hours of lecture & 3 hours of lab a week. Which means I basically prep two different classes for each subject. I create most of my own labs, sometimes they are based on labs others have done but often I can't find anything that meets learning outcomes I have. Then I have to obtain the material, set it up, conduct the lab and clean it up. I asked for, and received, student teaching assistants but being freshman or sophomore students they sometimes require almost more supervision than the help they provide. Kinda like getting your kids to do something they don't want to do! All of this can take 10-20 hours per week, for 3 hours of lab, which counts for 1 hour of 'teaching time'. Much more work than for 1 hour of lecture time. The inequality of this is a post for another time. It just makes time management all that more important.