Self-preservation, not self-indulgence

Hi all, welcome back. I hope all is well with you…and those around you.

Last week I talked about the Online Learning Collective Facebook Group that I helped start up. As of this morning, there are almost 23,000 members in the group. We’re also painfully aware that not all love Facebook. To that end, we’re reaching out to Twitter, and Instagram. I also moved our website to a new location. We’ve been getting a lot of traction in the news.

I continue to build out learning events in our mentored, open online learning community. Specifically, I built these:

• Moving across screens – Multimodality and teaching materials
• Show as opposed to tell – Screencaptures and screencasting
• Scaffolding student engagement – Instructional scaffolding & ZPD
• Reinventing the wheel – OER and Creative Commons licensing

I also posted two episodes of the Technopanic Podcast:

• Digital Schools and Surveillance – In this episode Kristen and I talk about the challenges of digital surveillance in my son’s school.
• Self-Care While Social Distancing – In this episode we are joined by Chris Mazura as we talk about how to balance parenting, teaching, and being a human without losing our minds.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe if you would like this newsletter to show up in your inbox. Feel free to reach out and let me know what you think of this work at hello@digitallyliterate.net.

Let’s Play: Angle Vocabulary Review (in Half Life: Alyx)

Half-Life: Alyx is a virtual reality game.

Charles Coomber, a San Diego-based teacher at Otay Ranch Academy for the Arts, used Half Life: Alyx, as a makeshift whiteboard to teach math. Pretty cool.

5 ways to keep human connections when moving learning online due to coronavirus

Let’s not lose high touch when we move to high tech.

Here’s 5 ways to keep it human:

• Simplify & be flexible
• Don’t assume people have reliable tech, or understand how to use it
• Look for ways to build community
• Don’t be afraid to crowdsource ideas
• Keep the big picture in mind

I recommend this resource on 14 tips for connecting with others that have limited Internet resources.

It is important that we think first about student agency in these times. This series of interviews with experts in the field (most of you are readers of this newsletter 🙂 ) is a great reflection point.

That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief

It’s important to acknowledge the grief you may be feeling, how to manage it, and how we can find meaning in it.

We all have different levels of grief and express it in different ways.

A couple ways to acknowledge & deal with this anxiety & grief:

• find balance in the things you’re thinking;
• calm yourself by coming into the present;
• let go of what you can’t control;
• stock up on compassion.

What It’s Like to Quarantine With Kids

I had a recent interview with Joshua Brustein from Bloomberg. Here’s some of results from that fun discussion.

On the topic of screentime, this piece from Dorian Traube and Ashwini Lakshmanan at The Conversation is great. The focus is on tele-health and children.

Make “work from home” work for you

This is primarily an ad for Google Apps, but it provides a ton of great principles to consider as you think about how to make “work from home” work for you. You can find the same info here in a different context.

#1 tip for mental health: Work at home doesn’t mean working all of the time.

• Designate your “spot” for working
• Use video chat like a pro
• Practice “one tab working”
• Act the part
• Play with your schedule & energy
• Don’t work all of the time
• Create “to-do list” the day before
• Finish one thing per day
• Cut yourself some slack

How to Clean and Disinfect All Your Gadgets

Make time in your schedule to clean & disinfect all of your gadgets this weekend. Seriously. We need you to stay healthy at home.

Whether you want to protect against COVID-19 or just give all your gadgets a deep-clean while you’re stuck at home, now’s the ideal time! Here’s how you can safely clean your tech gadgets, without damaging anything.

Speak your story

As a member of the Online Learning Collective, we’d love to hear your story during these trying times.

We started up a Speakpipe on our website to record 90 second messages about how you’ve been impacted personally and/or professionally. I’ll upload all of these messages to the Internet Archive.

Please take time to document this time. Please share with others.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

audre lorde

Digitally Literate is a weekly review of the news, notes, tips, and tricks from the week that resonated with me. I leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs. Feel free to pay attention if you’d like to check my notes. 🙂

Find your corner in the forest.

Connect at hello@digitallyliterate.net or on the social network of your choice.