Tag: reflection
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Reflections on Four Years of Blogging
It’s hard to believe that it’s been just over four years since I started this blog! To celebrate, I’d like to reflect on this experience, as well as share some previous favorite posts, according to visits and to me!
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Virtual Exchange with the Stevens Initiative COILed Classrooms
In addition to all of the other excitement this semester, I’ve also been participating in a virtual exchange program with our fourth semester Arabic class, through the Stevens Initiative Connected Classrooms program. While I’ve done virtual exchange before, it’s generally been pairing my students with individual language partners, rather than a classroom. So, I thought I’d use this post to share my experience with this project.
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Systems versus Tools
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between systems and tools. This is partially because of the Organize Your Language Teacher Life course I’ve been working on, as well as my own recent decision to make a major switch to the digital tools that support my own planning system. With digital tools in particular, I’ve noticed there’s a tendency to see the app itself as the system. I’ve even contributed to this myself in my posts about digital tools, with post titles like Using Trello for Home Management, or Trello for Travel. These titles make it sound like Trello is the key to managing these areas, but in fact Trello (or any digital app) is just a tool for making a particular system work in this area.
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Experiments with Notion
As blog readers know, I have been using the program Trello to organize projects in all of the various areas of my life, including my home, my work, travel, events, teaching, and more! However, I recently switched over to using another program, Notion, for a similar purpose, and so I thought I’d share here why I decided to switch and how it’s been going.
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Weekend Planning
While I’ve discussed weekly planning several times on this blog, it occurred to me recently that I’ve never discussed weekend planning, even though this is a fairly large component of my planning system! So, I thought I’d delve more into this process in this post.
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We Can Learn Arabic Website: Spring Update
Last Fall, I mentioned that my colleagues Heather Sweetser, Abdullah Serag, and I had launched We Can Learn Arabic, an open access website for Arabic learners at beginning and intermediate levels. This is the culmination of six years of moving away from a textbook in our lower level classes, as well as many of the research inspirations I’ve discussed on this blog, including multilingual and genre-based approaches and genre-based approaches. We’ve now been using the website in our classrooms for almost 1.5 semesters, so I thought I’d give an update on how it’s worked, improvements we’ve made, and plans for the future.
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Fall 2019 Review
Happy 2020! Given the number of decade in review posts I’ve seen around, perhaps I should be doing that instead. As it happens, however, this was quite an eventful decade for me, and every time I think about reviewing it, I just want to go to sleep instead. So, I’ll stick with Fall 2019, which was also fairly eventful in different ways. As I mentioned last Spring, I have a review process for reviewing various areas of my life, and I also keep track of some of them numerically.
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Weekly Planning Routine
If I had to choose one piece of productivity advice, it would probably be weekly planning! I talked about weekly planning and daily adjustments almost a year ago, but I’ve had some questions recently from friends about how I actually do my weekly planning process, so I thought I’d share it here.
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Telecollaboration in the Language Classroom: Challenges and Benefits
Although telecollaboration is one of my research contexts, I realized I’ve never written a post about it. So, here is a long overdue discussion of telecollaboration, the projects I’ve been involved in, and the lessons I’ve learned.
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Spring 2019 by the numbers
For several years now, I have tracked how much time I spend on particular work tasks, as part of an attempt to make sure I’m properly balancing the various components of my job (research, teaching, service/admin). I track this in a google spreadsheet by month (pictured below for May), and update it each week (from my planner daily pages) when I do my weekly planning. I tend to look at the numbers on a weekly and monthly basis, but I have not looked at the larger picture of the semester as a whole. So, I thought I’d do that in this post! In this post, I’m focusing on work, but you can see that I also track dance, home admin, and sleep hours*.