Summer goals 2010
Believe it or not I’m a good week and a half into the summer and I feel like time is flying by. I don’t like that. Finally yesterday I sat down and set out my goals and I think I have entirely too much to do. Hopefully I can make a dent in these.
1. Disney, Disney, Disney. I’m working on the bib. There are so many things to read! Disney is soooo huge! Since the From Mouse to Mermaid, Disney has opened up a theme park in Hong Kong, of all places, they are planning one to open in Shanghai, and the rebirth of Broadway as Disney World is old news. It’s impossible to suss out all the pies that Disney has its fingers in. So, I have my work cut out for me.
2. Computery type stuff. I spend way too much time on my computer and I don’t care what people think about that. I need to get a handle on my digital life, though. As I said in a recent post, I have 500+ bookmarks (unorganized), I’ve dropped my eight pages of “Read it Later” bookmarks to three, but that’s three too many. I’ve completely lost track of the blogs I want to follow, not to mention I probably couldn’t follow them all even if I wanted to. My Firefox multirow bookmarks tool now has ten rows of bookmarks; I’d like to get it down to…three? Doable? My email at home and at school is jam-packed with things I need to address. I’ve had to turn off my digital sticky notes because I can’t see my desktop and I have too damned many files on my desktop. So, *whew*, that’s some work.
3. Willow and I have devised a cleaning plan! Following the success of the step-by-step cleaning plan last summer, we have identified 46 steps to declutter and deep-clean the house. A step constitutes something that can be done with minimal effort in a short time span so that we don’t get bored, burned out, or overwhelmed. So far we have done two of them. That’s progress!
4. Revamp classes (again). I have so much I want to do and explore doing. Much of it requires that I learn some things first, though.
VISUAL AID SUCKITUDE: I most specifically want to work on visual aids. I have a huge haet on for visual aids, particularly PowerPoint. It’s sort of the standard speech teacher’s lament. A confluence of different things I’ve run across lately has made me re-think things. So I’ve decided to learn about visual aids and incorporate what I’ve learned in my classes next semester. I shall post about what I find, of course.
VIDEO SUCKITUDE: Last semester I used student-made videos in class. They were fun examples of experiential learning. Unfortunately, when it came time to show the videos in class, disaster struck. Formats, codecs, outdated software in the classrooms, bad lighting, and all manner of crazy dysfunctions created one headache after another. Over the past two weeks I have investigated various options for handling these problems but the journey continues.
I have other project, assignment, and activity ideas that I need to think through, so it will be a challenging summer to get all this mapped out. I want to think about working in vlogs, blogs, discussion boards, and wikis or some combination thereof.
5. I need to make good on my new year’s resolution to stay in touch with friends. I’ve slacked on that pretty badly lately.
So, busy busy busy.
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Have you tried google reader? it lets you follow most types of blogs. You can organize them into folders and stuff. It makes it easy to catch up on stuff you may have forgotten about. I even follow hulu shows, so when a new Glee comes out my Google Reader tell me.
Good luck with your bookmarks. :)
I tried Google reader ages ago but I never managed to pick up the habit of it. I shall do so! Thanks for the advice.