Speaker 1: On my blog, I offer teaching tips, tools, and resources for new college instructors. In today's post, I thought I'd give my top 5 tips from 5 different blog posts that I have for those instructors who are prepping for a new semester. All the blog posts that I talk about will be listed below, so make sure to check out the ones that you want to read more of. The first blog post to check out is called 5 Great Places to Find Inspiration for Class Activities. In it, I go over 5 different resources, but the one I think needs more attention are SOTL journals. SOTL stands for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and in journals specifically for this topic, there are plenty of practical examples of assignments to use in classrooms. Personally, my favorite journal to check out is literally called Pedagogy. You'll get access to plenty of these journals through your library database. Go ahead and check out which ones are available to you. In my blog post called Top 5 Online Resources for Teachers, I go over a few different online sources that you can use to lesson plan your whole course. The one that I suggest checking out the most is the MIT OpenCourseWare website. On this website, there are dozens and dozens of courses listed out from description to specific assignment descriptions, so if you're unsure about how to get started on your particular course that you've been assigned, I highly suggest checking out this website. If you do use assignments that you find on there, just make sure you give credit to the original creator in your assignment sheets. When prepping for your semester, I highly suggest using two different tools. The first tool I talk about in my blog post titled Top 5 Productivity Apps for Students, Teachers, and Writers. In that blog post, the one that I think you should check out the most is called Trello. Trello is both a website and app that's free to use that allows for project planning in a really clean and concise way. There are a lot of free templates already on the site that you could search for if the templates are public for anyone to use. You can just copy them into your own board and use them freely. In my post, I have two templates for use in a semester, one for teacher and one for students, so you can check out what I mean by how to use different boards and cards on your Trello site. While digital tools like Trello are great for keeping organized when project planning, I also highly recommend keeping a teaching journal as well. In my blog post titled Keep Organized, the Top 5 Benefits of Teaching Journals, I go over various reasons why I think keeping a journal on you throughout the semester is really beneficial. My favorite tip from this blog post is the third one, in which I talk about how you can use your journal to describe each class session as it occurs. That way, if later on in the semester a student mentions, hey, I don't think you did this, you can go back into your journal and see the exact date where something did or did not occur. Doing this also lets you look back and see if any patterns you didn't even notice in your teaching style as the semester went along. Finally, the blog post I definitely recommend checking out is called Top Teaching Tips for the New College Instructor. In this blog post, I go over 10 tips that I have for anybody who's new to teaching college courses. These tips range from the planning stage of the course all the way through what happens as the semester moves along. My top tip from this blog post is to make sure to schedule your courses so that deadlines don't overlap too closely. What I mean with this tip is that if you're teaching two different classes in the same semester or three or four or five, go ahead and see how you can schedule deadlines so that you have perhaps a week or two in between grading. That way, you don't get 60, 90, 120 papers on the same day. As a whole, my blog has a lot of other resources for new instructors and those who are looking for new ideas to use in their courses. If you want to check out the five blog posts I've just talked about, I'd love to know which one's your favorite and why. Let me know in the comments below. If you want to make sure to keep up to date with my new content, go ahead and click subscribe as well.