Señora Cummins' Reflections

A few years ago a friend introduced me to the Ennegram numbers.  It's basically figuring out your personality type.  I really gravitate towards these things because I enjoy learning about how to be my best.  I think our culture tries to mold everyone into 1 type and I like celebrating my own unique self and becoming the best version of it. Anyway, I found that I'm a 2 with a leaning towards 3.  This means that I'm a Helper with a leaning towards Hostess.  This is very well-suited to being the Hispanos Unidos (Spanish Club) co-sponsor.  I love developing relationships within our club and "hostessing" to make our meetings be a place of belonging. Later today I'm taking a group from our club to the Dallas Museum of Art to see a collection of Frida Kahlo's artwork.  This is the good stuff--spending time together and sharing experiences. However, building an online class isn't this.  My husband is a 5 on the Ennegram system.  He loves researching,...

A big challenge in editing an OER is knowing who to ask for help.  This project is just so big that I need to ask experts along the way. My area of expertise is teaching Spanish and guiding students as they learn.  I've learned a tremendous amount about technology, online teaching and the myriad of other challenges that have popped up unexpectedly as I've been working on this project. *Kathy, our library director.  The library website has a fantastic guide to help faculty as we use OER materials in our classes.  She's also been an encourager for me--cheering me on, giving advice, helping me figure out how to answer the questions for the bookstore and giving insight into how to build an online class. *Dana & Dr Ibe, my chair and Dean.  They encouraged me to pursue this and advised me as I began. *Chelsea, our graphic designer.  She designed the cover of the textbook and the 5 cover pages for each chapter.  I have very little knowledge in this area a...

Perfect.  It's a lovely ideal.  I prefer the broad strokes of the big picture to the small details.  This is fantastic in face to face teaching, but in online class building it's hard.  The details really, really matter or online classes are frustrating for students and instructors. I have edited/made digital all of the original OER textbook.  388 pages.  It was a lot of work. Also, I didn't want to have to manually grade every single assignment.  I figured out in Ch 2 that making a PDF of a PP slide was a great way to do practice activities.  I can use the slide in my hybrid sections but in my online I can add them to a page in a module.  Students can practice with them and then I added the answers on pg 2 of the PDF. Unfortunately I'm going back through Ch 1 and seeing I hadn't made this discovery yet so I'm undoing the work I did.  Yuck. I'm reminding myself of the growth mindset.  When I began this project I wasn't all that conf...

 So much to learn. *How to best use tech.  I'm now an expert on creating PDFs and I understand why they are better than copying and pasting as I did previously. *How to make the copier print in color.  I actually had to go to the tech dept to get help with this. *Letting myself take a break when I needed to.  I feel pressure to get this done.right.now but I'm learning that if I work when I feel motivated I make fewer mistakes that I have to fix later. *Not fixing every mistake right now.  I still haven't done the fine detail proofread.  I went ahead and printed out my "textbook" (the reading assignments and chapter summaries) so I can have a hard copy as I'm building.  This morning I found a mistake.  Boo.  I just put a sticky note, highlighted what needs to be fixed and when it's time to revise this I'll take care of it. *Remembering the big picture.  Helping students.  Cutting cost for them.  Cutting frustration for me with d...