Aquinas College's Tech Ramblings

This week Reading: Phonics: Writing: Math: Specials: Important Events: I am attempting to make this my newsletter template... I'll have to see if it works, now. :) I tested it out on the blog I created for my classroom and it worked! whew! 

Since these are relatively easy tasks they make it feel like I accomplished something even though I should probably be planning and building my courses in courseconnect. Here is a picture of my personal/professional website that I could also be working on. So far, I have done a relatively okay job using it as a repository for my publications and media interviews. Here is link if you want to click through it:  https://michaeljlorr.com/ Not sure how I might use this in teaching, but my students always like to look at my website when I show them I have one.

Any text-based information I share with students I can do via the LMS, so I never found a real use for a blog.  Being an itinerant visitor, I didn't need a stable home page for my research (which depends on students and available equipment).  I do, however, use web-based materials for classes.  Since computational tools are now readily available, I use some assignments with simplified versions.  To this end, I write a lot of server-side code to access the computational tools so students need not install anything on a local machine. One such site I have been revisiting in preparation for the fall is a web-based queue system for running Monte Carlo calculations for statistical thermodynamics.  Students access the main page which shows all jobs associated with the queue. A student can submit a new job- either a simple Ising model (magnetic system) or a rare-gas system.  A web form lets them input the parameters: Data from completed jobs can be viewed Selecting...

I have a personal website with a Blog feature , but I have only made 3 posts in the last...4 years.  Home page My blog feed   I have lots of ideas and opinions (ha!), but it isn't really my instinct to write them out and force them on other people (because, let's be honest, I would HAVE to post links on social media for anyone to find these). I do find that writing about an idea is an effective means to force myself to think through that idea, its underlying assumptions, and the specific aspect that interests me. However, I often don't seem to have the extra time for something that feels like work. Maybe if I approached it with the perspective that my words could actually help someone else, that would give me motivation to make more posts.