Excited with a bit of anxiety

This coming year I will dedicate to a year of mental, intellectual, and physical renewal and rejuvenation, thanks to my District awarding me a full year sabbatical.

My full year project involves many small projects involving curriculum and content knowledge development anchored by a big lab curriculum update for three of our introductory courses.

The project officially started in the beginning of May 2014 when prepared and OCR'd all the electronic pdf copies of the three lab manuals.  Since then, I have devoted 3-4 hours a week beginning the process of cleaning up the word files and refitting and reformatting all the illustrations, and noting in each section the revisions I need to make.  I have also started an Excel spreadsheet detailing all the changes that I can then hand out to other instructors as a summary of revisions so they are aware when they start using the new editions in Fall 2015.  To date, I have completed this first phase of the project for close to 4 out of the 10 units in the first manual.  It has been sometimes tedious and excruciating editing work but it would bear fruit later on as it makes it easier for the program hereon to make revisions now that they will all be on editable, electronic forms.

I have also met with one of the biology instructors and talked to her about my smaller project involving developing questions for our allied intro chem class that involve actual processes and language they use in the physiology class for which most of my students are taking the 30A class as a prerequisite.  I have obtained copies of the anatomy and physiology lab manuals and Barbara will be letting me borrow a microbiology some time in the fall.

I have gathered several electronic versions of articles for reading and have downloaded 5 of the books from my reading list of 20 or so books for content development.

One one other small project i have is doing some SLO process research.  I have not started this yet except to download some relevant articles regarding the SLO process in other schools.

In addition, I have a growing list of other to do things that i want to use my sabbatical time off to do.  Quite optimistic in my part but It is always good to have a list!


That is it for now!