Speaker 1: Can you do this with your grading too? Yes, you can, and you definitely should, right? It's definitely the way to go when it comes to grading. Hey there, this is Erica Romero from Ever Educating, and this channel is teaching tips for new college instructors, and a lot of ed tech tips recently as well. Last month, I asked what you wanted to see more of, and the majority winner was more tips and ideas for hybrid and online teaching. However, it's January 1st, and so I couldn't resist doing a video on the runner-up, which was more time management and productivity tips for educators. So today, we're talking about five tips on this topic exactly. Now, I have multiple videos on this topic that I'll link below for you to see next, but the first tip, and it comes from one of these videos, is time chunking, okay? So you might notice that's time blocking, but in my case, I call it time chunking because basically, you're chunking together various tasks related to teaching, or related to anything, of course, but it's not nine to 9.30, do this, and 9.30 to 10, do that, and so on. It's from nine to 11, do these three things, or do these two things, and you can do it in whatever order you want, rather than having the time blocking, which to me is more specifically during these time blocks, do these specific tasks. I prefer chunking things and just saying, hey, between nine to 11, between one to four, between six to eight, do these various things, and as long as they're accomplished, who cares the exact half hour that they're actually done in in that chunk of time, right? So I do really recommend this, and potentially take it a step further and actually have different days designated for different types of tasks that you chunk together. So maybe lesson planning happens on Monday and Wednesday, and then grading happens on Tuesdays, you know, that kind of stuff, if you wanna have a theme. But what's key here, at least to me, is chunking my time with certain tasks. Can you do this with grading as well? You can, and I definitely recommend doing so, all right? So when you get 50, 100, 30, however many assignments from your students, I really recommend chunking the grading together. So you might have, for example, okay, Monday is my grading day, and so from nine to 11, all I have set for me is to grade, but actually chunk in that period. So what I do is, okay, let's say I have 30 that are given to me, then I'm like, all right, I'm gonna do sets of three, right? And so I have, or I did three, and it might take a while to grade, and I'll take a little break, maybe have another task to do or just do something relaxing. Okay, now I'm back, let's do another three, and then take a break, right? Or you can do five, so you only have six sessions to do. Depending on how many you get, you can decide how many to do in a chunk, and obviously the length of the assignment, how long it takes to grade, will also inspire how many you do in one chunk. But I really recommend this, because it really makes it easier to pass the time than, oh, I'm just gonna do grading for two hours. Very overwhelming, right? And so I really recommend just saying, you know what? I'm gonna be doing these in sections of four, in sections of five, or maybe it's a really short assignment in sections of 10. So chunking, not just your time for tasks, but also how many grading assignments you do at once in order to make them go through quicker without that feeling of overwhelm. Now, because scheduling things is so flexible during this HyFlex or online teaching semesters, I recommend having routines that you create in order to have a healthier lifestyle. So it gives you a bit more boundaries to work with than what we actually currently have when we're kind of really, you know, having a very strange schedule going on. And so for me, I use my digital daily routine journal for this, and you can have it as well if you want to. I'll link it below. But basically here is I have, okay, what's my morning routine for the day? What are today's tasks, right? What's my night routine? What am I grateful for, and what self-care did I do today? And so each day I write these things down so I can track, okay, you know, my morning routine. I've been doing the same thing every single day. I find it easy to do it. You know, I don't want to skip it. You know, I'm excited for it. I should add this and keep it in my morning routine. This landed one out of five times, but I still think it'll be really helpful. I'm gonna try again next week. Make sure you're basically tracking what routines you're doing or what things you're doing that you feel should be part of your routine to help you wake up in the morning, to help you wind down at night, right? And of course, self-care is super key. Gratitude is super key during these times. And so I have that section too, just to make sure, okay, I spent some time for myself today. You know, I spent some time thinking about what I'm grateful for today. So again, you can obviously create this in your own bullet journal or in a notebook, or if you want the digital version that I have, you can find it below. But definitely have routines that can help you stay on track, help you have a healthier lifestyle. It's January 1st, right? Now's the time to start. But if it's not January 1st when you're watching this, it's still time to start getting into a good routine if you're not in one already. All right, this applies to any time of the year, not just on today's special day. The next tip is on lesson planning. I have a whole video on this, and I have a whole successful start series that has a free workbook and blog posts and videos that talk about designing your first college course or new college course. But this tip specifically is about lesson planning one day a week rather than two or rather than three, depending on how many days you teach. So if you teach Tuesday, Thursday, rather than designing Tuesday on Monday and designing Thursday on Wednesday, design both on Monday or on Sunday or Saturday, whatever day you choose. So a lot of times, obviously you can plan more than a week at a time, but for me, you don't really know your students yet. You don't know what level they're at, what their experience is at. So a week at a time isn't the worst case scenario if you're teaching a new course. But this way, if you do all your lesson planning for the week on Monday or on Sunday, it's one less day that you're taking time away from other tasks that are really important to you. So again, this is really easy. It's just plan your whole week on one day rather than dividing the planning into two or three if you teach three days a week. I have other tips, like I said. I'll link that video below about lesson planning. Another tip if you're teaching for the first time or just if you wanna revamp your course is look for OER, Open Educational Resources, that you can use in your class. Okay, so I have a whole video on what this is and where to find them. I'll link it below as well. But basically here is you're finding free-to-use resources online that you can just use in your classroom. Don't create everything from scratch when you can literally just find things that are helpful online that are just open for any educator to use. Okay, there's multiple sites of OERs where you can do this kind of work. And I really recommend it so you have less time needed to actually create the examples or the resources for your class. Same with when you have assignments that you're gonna give mentor text to your students. I have a video on this tip as well, but basically here it's once you do this for the first time, ask certain students, hey, you did really well on this, can I use your paper or your project in future semesters as a mentor text for the new students? If you're okay with that, let me know. I can take off your name off of the project. And that way you're collecting this student work and you can use those examples in the future rather than having to make them from scratch or finding examples from online or whatever the case may be. Okay, so that's kind of a double whammy here. Go to open educational resources as well as to pass students asking for and finding examples that you can use in your classroom. If you are new to teaching, I really do recommend subscribing to this channel because next week we're gonna be talking more about designing your first course ever. But for now, go ahead and take a look at the Successful Start series that I have linked below. It's five videos, five blog posts, and a whole workbook, more than 60 pages, for you to use to design your first college course. Click like and subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you next time with a new video.