Advancing Learning 2018

As a part-time professor of graphic design for the last 13 years, I have been refining both my workflow and teaching methods to be as efficient as I can while doing the best job that I can for my students. I create interactive workshop handouts rather than printed ones which saves toner and paper while allowing us to hit the ground running in class more quickly.  I have created an extensive library of screencasts that I embed into my D2L framework.

I've created robust, and custom project rubric templates in Apple's Numbers spreadsheet app that automatically calculate all totals. I embed links in the rubric feedback section that connects students to one of my screencasts to help them in an area where they may be having difficulty. I store commonly needed comments in a menu bar utility for quick insertion. I've written an Applescript that will prepare a rubric based on a template that I select for each student in the class list in a matter of seconds. I've written an Applescript that will save all of the completed rubrics for the entire class to PDFs in seconds. I've written an Applescript that looks at my class list and then creates named project folders for every student. A typical student folder for 'project 1' would be named Smith_Steven_P1. I have an Applescript that will generate my root level folders for new course setups. I have set-up a multi-step file renaming system for batch renaming a full folder of student submissions from D2L.

I'm all about using technology to the fullest especially to create solutions to ease the "grunt work" so that I can spend more time doing the tasks that I enjoy, like creating new original content and recording screencasts.