Googling!

By -
I'm at a workshop at Google Headquarters this week and testing out this map tool:


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to classes with almost no concern for COVID

By -
Image
Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash   Classes start next Monday and I will be there with my KN95 mask on. I might be the only one since Miami University is not requiring masks despite CDC recommendations for our county being to the contrary. I can't see how this will go well. People are still being hospitalized and dying of COVID. Why should we pretend otherwise? I had hoped they would start with masks with all the students returning to campus, but that is not the case. It's very frustrating. I am not immune compromised, but I'm sure there are those on campus on who are. This policy just seems very misguided. I watched the webinar posted on the U website and that was even more worrying to me. It sounds like they want to rely 100% on personal responsibility for keeping COVID numbers down. Yes, there are people who will be careful, but not everyone!  So that's how I'm feeling a week out from classes. I do get to teach Landscape Ecology again- it's only...
Read more

A week in the life

By -
So academics have their summers off, right? We may not be teaching (although plenty of us teach at least some summers), but we have plenty of other things going on. Here's what I have on my plate this week: Meeting with my REU student to go over more preprocessing steps. We have five Landsat images to process and analyze and are just getting into the preprocessing now. It can be very tedious and requires great attention to detail. Attending a MA proposal defense. Graduate students have to have committee approval of their proposed thesis work before their travel funding is released. Most students finish this in April and May, but some are still working to plan their field visits in what remains of the summer. Attending a REU cluster meeting. We are going to be discussing articles from two visiting speakers. I still need to read the papers and they are on topics quite outside of my discipline and area of expertise. Reading like this is usually best done near a computer so that I can ...
Read more

Teaching Evaluations

By -
I think most of us in academia complain about teaching evaluations in one way or another and many articles have been written on the problems with student evaluation of instruction. Since we made the switch to online evaluations another problem is low response rates. Some faculty have "tricks" that they claim work: offering extra credit if a certain response rate is reached, threatening not to grade exams if a certain response rate is NOT reached, giving in-class time to fill them out. I've tried some of these but the rates are still quite low. For online classes it's even worse. So on top of the other issues with student evaluation of teaching, there may not be enough data either. At my university, they encourage us to use "multiple measures of teaching effectiveness" in the form of midterm evaluations of some kind. I have used Small Group Instructional Diagnosis several times to get feedback on what is and isn't working in classes. This semester I...
Read more