Hi there,
My very first car was a ’78 yellow Chevette. I don’t know why I always have to include its colour. Maybe because it paints a picture of what a lemon it was. The driver’s side window was broken and taped shut. If someone tried to roll it down 😟, it fell inside the car door and remained there until a mechanic fished it out. The driver’s inside door handle was missing so the only way out was through the passenger’s door. Since the car was a standard, the huge stick shift turned exiting into a form of pole vaulting. Passing through the booth and paying the toll on the MacDonald Bridge required a degree of athleticism that one should not have to possess to simply cross a bridge.
I could go on about the carburetor and how it didn’t do what carburetors should do which is TO START THE CAR! And how it forced me to jump start the engine EVERY DAMNED TIME I needed to go anywhere. But, I digress.
Or do I? Despite the many things that were wrong with the car, I always found a way to make it work. I drove if for years and learned workarounds.
My teaching online, this week, reminded me of my yellow Chevette. Little things that went wrong that caused me stress in the moment but that were fixable in an imperfect but totally acceptable kind of way.
That’s what this edition of Teaching Online is about: the duct tape, bailer twine ways we find to hold s*@t together until we get a new car (another Chevette also standard and I installed the speakers myself which meant they didn’t work).
December’s Blogs
Workarounds You Can Use
In this month's Teaching Online, we’ll look at how to solve 2 potentially stressful, yellow Chevette situations:
A traffic jam on your Jamboard
The Zoom or Teams Gods deciding, for reasons you will never know or understand, that, “No, you can’t share your screen with your learners today. And, yes, we did let you share it before but now we’ve changed our minds.”
Virtual Classrooms
I'll also show you a cool way of delivering course materials to students in a "virtual classroom" aka interesting handout (PS The next edition of Teaching Online will show you how to create one).
Animate a Mouse
And, finally, I'll share a useful app that you can use to animate your mouse🐭. Because who doesn't want to animate their mouse? Seriously though, this tool makes your mouse visible so students can see where you're pointing and clicking.
Cheers,
Alison 🤓