The Blog of a Chronic Content Creator
We’re at the end of the Summer II term, and I’m reading term papers. It has made me think about the biggest issues I see with student writing today. So here is my list, in no particular order, of my biggest pet peeves. If you are a student in one of my classes, this is …
Continue reading “Dr. Westfall’s Writing Pet Peeves (a.k.a. How to Write a Paper I Won’t Hate)”
In my classes I’ll often have students give short presentations, and recently I wanted to allow my students to also rate each other. Here’s a very quick and easy way to accomplish that while also having the data analyzed to tell you who is the ‘winner’ Create your rating forms in Google Forms. I made …
Continue reading “Easy In-Class Presentation Ratings Using Google Forms, Sheets, and R”
I made this in about 5 minutes… sometimes having the right tool means pay a bit of money to speed up your workflow. Could I have done it for free? Yes. As accessibly? No.
It’s been awhile since I’ve talked productivity on this blog, but recently I’ve had a number of people point out to me that I’m extremely busy. If you don’t know, I have a few different roles professionally and personally – if you’re really curious, here’s the list as of today. But without boring you, know …
Continue reading “I’m Busy – My Best Tips and Tricks for A Productive Professional Life”
I have 2 offices, which means that when someone makes an appointment with me, they need to be aware which office I’ll be meeting them at. My appointment provider (YouCanBook.Me) sends an appointment request to both myself and the person making the appointment, and I then update my copy with the location. This then sends …
One of my classes this semester requires me to track how often students speak in class, and evaluate each comment. I also have students leading discussion, and I need to be able to generate completed rubrics easily for them so they get my feedback. I’ve found that I can keep track of all of this …
Last week I attended a workshop on Differential Education, and realized that I’m already doing something very “differential-ly” – starting this semester in my General Psychology class. Students do a five minute entry ticket each day upon coming into class, and a five minute exit ticket on the way out. Combined, these two tickets count …
Continue reading “Entry and Exit Tickets in Google Forms / Sheets – Flexible and Fun”
One of the great things about being a professor is that we’re essentially trained to be project managers – people who are specialists in a given topic area but also trained through graduate school to be self-sufficient. It surprises many to learn that when I’m assigned a course to teach, I receive very few ‘mandated’ …
Continue reading “ProfLife – Being Productive Out of the Office”
Ran across this nice little trick a few months back. One of the things I miss about SAS was the ability to copy/paste data directly into a SAS script. While it’s nice to load from an external file, for small datasets it can be more useful to have everything in just one file. This is …
Continue reading “Load Data From Your R Script Directly, No Files Needed”