Amazingly, faculty are already trickling back, setting up for the new year. Deptartment Chair, Steve Farver, and Language Lab Liaison, Diane Jackson, spent a few hours with me yesterday reviewing a lot of the details: lab scheduling, lab equipment, training, lab walk-in hours, etc. etc. It was an thick meeting, for sure, but as I wrote up minutes, I was really pleased. A lot of my questions have been answered and all signs point to a great year ahead.
We decided to try establishing faculty walk-in hours during the school day. Steve will have the challenge of identifying 2 - 3 hours during the week, which taken together, will allow each faculty member to have at least a chance of getting to the lab for training. Diane and I will set up themes for the different weeks (about 28 in all for the year). So we’ll see how much response we get. I figure if everyone takes advantage of the walk-in hours at least once during the fall quarter, than it will have been worth it.
The A/C is under repair in the high school and it just got to be too much yesterday. So I’m working remotely from the basement probably until the end of next week. I will be very grateful when that is back up and running. The things we take for granted!
My focus for the rest of the summer is pretty clear now. I have thirteen more working days (basically) before school starts, since I will be gone to Berlin from the 27th - 6th of August. I’m sad I’ll miss all the meeting and greeting that goes on during planning week, but I am also confident that we’ll be able to hit the ground running the minute I get back.
My current to-do list looks something like this:
- Still working on the Wiki documentation. Big project but well worth my time. This is like an in-house online reference tool that is allows each member of the IS group to share its mission critical information with one another. I’m finding it to be an incredibly helpful tool. Now that I have a place to document all of the little tips and clues related to my job, it’s starting to become a habit. Whenever I get some little tidbit of information, a port number here, a setting there, I just plop it in the Wiki and it’s saved for posterity’s sake…
- Faculty Intro Materials & Blog Documentation. I have a lot of ideas for this, but we’ll have to see what I can pull off in time. Hopefully, an intro video (so that people who haven’t met me yet can at least know who I am when I come back), a training video for our new WebCal reservation system, a video and documentation on DiLL to help people get started again, a short interview with Curt regarding technology integration, Plan C.H.O.C.O.L.A.T.E. (have no idea what that acronym is going to stand for, but we’ll figure something out), an image of the weekly class schedule so that teachers can see who is vying for the same lab times and coordinate appropriately, a glossary of tech terms, and a few sheets of documentation on this blog, just so that it isn’t a total shell when the faculty get here.
- If I’m really lucky, than I’ll get a good template up for this blog and doctor it a little.
- Hopefully, our new lab cabinet will be here before too long and I can store all the lab’s equipment too… that might not happen until the first weeks of school. We’ll have to see.
That’s about all, and good enough to get us started in the fall, I think!
