This post is part of a series featuring faculty members’ reflections on how have their teaching and research methods have changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Below, we hear from Harriet Baber, Philosophy Professor:
“I’ve been experimenting with various technical solutions and this is what I’m doing. First, I’ve always maintained class websites where I keep all stuff for students, including the syllabus, schedule, readings, PowerPoints, handouts, links, etc. They’re WordPress sites, which are flexible and easy to manage. I’m now making Zoom recordings in which I do voice-over on the PowerPoints which I share on the screen. I post these recordings to class websites. I go into Zoom outside of Blackboard which makes it much more straightforward. I’ve never used Blackboard and hope I never have to.”
“Logic classes pose special difficulties because you have to do problems on the board. You can do this on the virtual ‘whiteboard’ at Zoom, which is ok. But what you can do with a Mac, iPad, and iPencil is plug in the iPad to the Mac for Zoom and share the iPad screen. So on one side of the screen recording Zoom I show the PDF of the textbook, and on the other side I work through the logic problems with voice-over. The app for iPad I use for this is LiquidText, which is wonderful!”