It’s Spring Break for me as a teacher this week. I have plans to get caught up and even ahead on some things. Stay tuned.

I deleted TikTok on my phone. Yay, me! It’s unbelievable what a time suck it had become. “I’m too old for TikTok!” “I won’t spend more than two minutes looking at TikTok!” Yeah, right. The only way to protect myself is to completely remove the temptation.

Thinking about whether to use Miro to replace my use of Trello and even some of my use of Google Docs in my online Agile Project Management course. Initial verdict is no for icebreaker type activities and maybe as my replacement for Trello.

Had a good time doing a Racket with @cm on the topic of “Facilitation Do’s.” We were going to talk about “Do’s and Don’ts” but ran out of time which is part of the beauty of Racket – only nine minutes!

Listen here:

<racket.com/chadgmoor…>

Today I became an Advanced Certified Scrum Master, woo hoo!

Getting ready for Micro Camp 2021: August 13-14, woo hoo!

Sometimes in the morning I have to remind myself “Lisa, you are wasting the few good minutes that you get in a day.” So I’ll bid micro.blog goodbye until this afternoon and get going on the online class I’m teaching Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday this week.

So I’m teaching a corporate workshop next week, on Agile/Scrum as usual. And even though we launch next Tuesday, I’m seriously converting all of the collaborative work to Miro! I hope the client talks me out of this madness, though I will do this conversion at some point.

I finished teaching my Agile course for another year, it’s all done but the grading. It was a weird pandemic semester … and I had a great group of students who were willing to participate in all the odd online activities that I created for them.

We use an application called Yellowdig for online discussion forums in my class 🏫. I really like it. It has a bit of an algorithm so that the most “interesting” posts are automatically at the top. It manages automated grading quite well. And it looks good.

Oops, I let myself get behind on course grading. 🏫 Trying to get entirely caught up today. May or may not make it. Let’s see, there was a new client, a snowstorm with power outage, and a COVID vaccine that put me in bed for a day.

I just taught a 3-hour face-to-face class (with good social distancing). The first one I’ve done since November. I am utterly exhausted. It’s interesting to note this reaction. These days, teaching on Zoom doesn’t wear me out. I’ll have to work on being w/humans again.

Copy Google Doc. Rename. Sharing – Anyone with the link can Edit. Copy Link. Paste in Bit.Ly and give it a friendly name. Repeat 6 more times for the 7 Breakout groups in tonight’s webinar. Repeat for each breakout in each webinar. I wonder if I can automate this?

Just submitted a nomination for a very deserving artist for New Hampshire’s Governors Arts Award in Folk Heritage. Fingers crossed that they are selected!

A struggle to come up with a set of User Stories for my students to split during a breakout activity next week. 🏫 Stories needed to be challenging but not too challenging, and had to exemplify a variety of splitting techniques. My brain hurts but I think I have what I need.

Spent the AM preparing for tomorrow night’s webinar. 🏫 The students will be doing Pair-Shares where they look at each other’s recent homework. I decided to force the pairing for the first round, to pair students who I think can help each other. The second round will be random.

Getting ready to grade a bunch of Agile Activity Backbone assignments. 🏫 This is the first step on the path toward creating Story Maps.

Wrapping my head around teaching the next few webinars. 🏫 The material is so intertwined that it’s hard to get things into the right order. Grateful for Zengobi Curio - Note Taking, Mind Mapping, Brainstorming which helps me to move topics around and visualize the order.

I finally figured out that I’m using Derek Sivers’ concept of the /now page page incorrectly, but I like the way I’m using it to Work Out Loud. Today was mostly in recovery from teaching last night, and attending the PMI PMExpo.

Added my Now stream at micro.blog to https://nownownow.com. I like Working Out Loud and this seems like a good way to do it.

Got Internet back, the old DSL instead of the new fiber. Decided to stick with a business account even though I’ll have to go with 250Mb symmetrical instead of 1G. It’s worth it to be able to complain more vociferously when the Internet is down. Should have fiber in weeks.

Worked through the next 8 webinars, moving from the planning map to mostly complete Keynote slides.

Finished grading the latest assignment. This assignment built on the last one, and the next one will build on this one. I wrote all of my comments in a separate document before pasting the comments into Canvas. Now I can easily compare what I recommended to what they did.

Working on Webinar 8, the mid-point of the semester. Trying out a new way to get students to write small User Stories for their Agile projects, using some ideas from Bill Wake.

I just finished reconciling bank accounts and credit cards. I’m getting ready for Toastmasters this evening, where I will be the Table Topics Master, working with the theme “New Beginnings.”