Believe it or not, I’ve already begun to prepare for the class that I teach each fall. This will be my third time teaching the class and I’m trying to increase the quality of my presentation of the material each time around. Last fall I spent a great deal of time revising and refreshing my PowerPoint presentations. My hope this time around is to use the remainder of the summer months to really dig into the growing array of textbooks that are sent to me to create some powerful PowerPoints and class handouts.

The other thing that I really need to do is freshen up the YouTube videos that I use in the classes. Some of the videos are getting a little bit dated considering that I first used them two years ago. Also, a lot of the videos in the last two years revolved around the Presidential campaign (because we have two years worth of Presidential campaigns these days – what a shame).

I’ve also prepared an e-mail to send out to my students suggesting that they try to save some money by using alternative textbook websites such as alibris.com or chegg.com (where you can actually rent the textbook as opposed to buying it).

I know it’s early to start this stuff, but I figure the more time I spend doing these things now, the less craziness I have to contend with during the semester.