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How to Cut Down on Time Spent Checking Student Emails

If you haven’t figured out how to cut down on the time you spend answering student emails, I may have the answer for you! When I tell other teachers that I have a number of stock email responses ready to go in the Notes app of my iPhone, some of them are relieved to have…

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How to Motivate Students: The Perfect Films for Communication Courses

Every teacher knows that sometimes you have a class that’s super motivated, while another class is barely hanging in there. There’s not necessarily a rhyme or reason for it, it just happens. The solution? I won’t attempt to go into that at the moment, but you can do a variety of activities, see how things…

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5 Easy College Classroom Strategies to Help Students Succeed

The other day I was sifting through some old ideas in my ‘Notes’ app, and I stumbled on some helpful student success strategies that never quite saw the light of day, so I thought I’d share them here. These are my top 5 super easy and fun ways to engage students in a way that…

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What I’ve Learned from Teaching Online While Traveling

Teaching online while I’ve been traveling for the past 3 weeks has been much more manageable than I expected. Yes, there were mornings in Bangkok where I graded papers on the hotel bathroom while my sister slept in, and one morning in particular that I had a Skype interview for a new school at 6…

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How to Prepare for One Month of Working Remotely: The 3 Most Important (and Potentially Obvious) Things to Take Care of Before You Leave

Working from home seems to be more common these days, and it make sense that those of us doing so would want to make the very most of it. Whether you take the opportunity to stay home with your kids, work odd hours, or travel the world, being ‘location independent’ is a tremendous opportunity that…

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The Art of Adding Color and Design to Online Courses

As I’ve been working this afternoon, making some big changes to my online courses here at the public library (my new favorite place to ‘work from home’), and also trying to come up with something to write about on the blog today, it occurred to me that maybe I could blend the two (why is…

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3 Quick Tips for Increased Efficiency in Teaching Online

While brainstorming what I should write about for the blog today, I decided the topic of ‘easy efficiency would be a something valuable to discuss. If you’re an online instructor, there are little inconveniences that creep in throughout the semester that become frustrating (sometimes without it occurring to us that we could actually fix these…

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Happy Professors Series: Teaching Online, Breaking the Mold, and Leading By Example

“I’ve honestly been thinking a lot about why I teach online at so many schools, and why I like it.  I’m in a unique situation because I’m also a military spouse, but the main reasons are that I like to challenge myself, and I need to set a good example and show my daughter that…