Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning at LVC

Adjunct faculty presentation

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:00:58 -0500

I had the opportunity to discuss teaching and learning ideas with the adjuncts a week before school started. What a great group of people who do a very difficult job - they usually just get dumped in the classroom with little guidance, so I hope our conversation provided some useful ideas. Here's the Adjunct Presentation (PDF) I used that focuses on how people learn and how to design effective classes that actually can work for students (and you).

From notebooks to eportfolios - organizing student work

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:15:53 -0500

Here is the handout from the discussion on moving students away from stacks of paper and into the digital world of collecting, organizing, and sharing their work from school. We discussed the benefits of using a blog website for personal content management. StudentEportfolios.pdf

Handouts from sessions available

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:43:44 -0500

I've taken all the handouts from our discussion sessions and compiled them on a new page here on the website. On the right under Pages, go to Discussion Handouts for the complete list. Most are PDFs with some PowerPoint sprinkled in for taste.

ELI 2009 Orlando conference

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:17:20 -0500

Dale Erskine, Mike Fry, Mike Zeigler, and Barry Hill just got back from the Educause Learning Initiative conference in Orlando. This is one of the most productive, informative conferences around where institutions share what they are doing with technology and learning. Very cool stuff, such as visualizing data and places through rich-media Google Maps, development of e-portfolios and personal publishing applications, use of mobile technologies (smart phones, etc), and many others. I'll be posting some examples on the site in the near future, and after Mike F and Dale E return from sabbatical we'll have all of us share our experiences at a CETL session.

A very powerful way to collect photos for any topic

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:07:44 -0500

Check this out - how about automatically finding photos that are tagged for a certain topic into a single timeline? As an example, I used the Tickr application at the Dipity website (http://www.dipity.com/mashups/tickr/) and typed in Pablo Picasso. This is the result:

Click on the photos to scroll through the stack. You can then post this into your blog, Facebook, whatever. It only grabs photos from Flickr, an online photo site where people post their picts, but it can still be a powerful tool.

How about another one on Vladimir Horowitz? Notice that some photos don't make sense - it can only look at the tags people have given the photos they post, but most of them are really great. You can add more specificity to the search keywords to see if that helps filter out the nonsense. Even cooler, click on Map, then click a marker, and it will show a photo associated with that location.

Facilitating class discussion

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:00:57 -0500

We had a great discussion on how to get students to talk in class. Lots of ideas, questions, and solutions were tossed around, and it was refreshing to have such a productive, learning-related time of sharing. Here are two documents: a handout I provided which lists several ideas to consider and a summary of the discussion (as best as I could remember). Many thanks to those who came - I know it was a difficult time of the year.

The handout

The summary

How do I get started with a blog website? UPDATE

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:58:05 -0500

Funny you should ask...here are the options:

ITS is now offering blogs for courses and personal use (faculty and staff). See David Shapiro to get yours up and running, and I will be glad to visit with you to show some ideas, help you set things up, whatever.
I've been running most of my blogs through wordpress.com, mainly because I did all this before LVC developed on-campus capability. These are free, offer a wide variety of themes and options, but are not supported by LVC staff.

Now...go blog.

What is Web 2.0?

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:34:51 -0500

Instead of writing a paper trying to describe what Web 2.0 is, digital ethnographer Michael Wesch from KSU developed this clip. See what you think.

Digital portfolios for students

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:58:45 -0500

There is a lot of attention these days on using ePortfolios for students to post their work, track their progress, and even implement as part of an assessment strategy. I know at least a few of you are interested in such a concept, and the education department has all their students doing some type of portfolio, so what I'd like to know is how many of you would like to engage in a discussion on how to implement eportfolios: what they are, what they could look like, how they might work, what tools you would use to create and maintain them, how they relate to students' courses, degree programs, and/or life at the college overall. I think this is a highly relevant topic that we should pursue, so send me a line to share your thoughts.

Blackboard or Blog? What's best for my class?

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:36:55 -0500

As Mike Zeigler showed us today at the CETL workshop, Blackboard is a powerful platform for managing your course: secure grading, student file submission, group collaboration, etc. Two weeks ago I showed how you can easily set up a blog-based website for posting documents such as a syllabus, creating links to external sites, posting videos, audio, photos, etc. So which one do you need? Depends on what you want to do. If all you want to do is post content, link to other sites, and want to easily update and edit all of it, then a blog-based site is perfect for you. If you want the secure environment for grades, group discussion, etc, then go with BB. IT can help you get started with BB as well as show you the really cool advanced features it provides. I can help you set up your blog site and begin posting content. Contact me and I can help you find the right tool.

Did you miss it? Here's the blog workshop handout

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:52:14 -0500

If you did not attend the workshop on using blog websites, here's the handout. The last slide includes addresses to websites I showed and can get you started with ideas. Again, my primary purpose for this topic is to help faculty get started with their own website, begin posting rich content that can be used in class or in collaboration with other people, and then begin to think creatively about how this technology can dramatically enhance what we do at the college. One step at a time, but I'm looking to get interested people together to brainstorm ideas. Here are two example sites: a very simple one I'm using now, and one demo site I put together for the presentation.

If you have questions about any of this let me know - I'll be glad to help get you started.

Using Wordpress for creating a website

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:08:43 -0500

I spent some time this summer converting all my websites over to Wordpress. What's that mean? The old sites were the typical html pages that I had to update by editing files in Dreamweaver, uploading via FTP, forever fixing broken links, trying to remember the code for videos, etc. What a nightmare, and so I began experimenting with both Wordpress and Moveable Type this past spring. I actually ended up asking Mike Fry to install a server copy of Moveable Type for me to run the CETL website - so that's what's running this post you're reading. For my other stuff I decided on Wordpress, and I like it a lot. These are both blog-based

Grant awards announced

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:42:49 -0500

We're pleased to offer $1000 Course Design Enhancement Grants to the following faculty members for Spring 2008:

Mike Fry, Math Sciences
Michael Kitchens, Psychology
Renee Norris, Music
Bob Valgenti, Religion & Philosophy
Jane Yingling, Education

The Grants page (see right menu) includes PDFs of their applications so you can see what they are working on.

ELI presentation on blogs, wikis, connectivism, and other cool stuff

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:31:50 -0500

Here are the presentation and notes documents used by Fry, Duffy, Kline, and Hill during their CETL presentation April 3. We touched on many ideas and technologies, so don't try to absorb it all at once. Contact any of us and we can show you through any of the items we showed, such as using a wiki in class, setting up a blog-based website for class or portfolio using Wordpress (running my mental model assessment site) or Epsilen (New York Times portfolio site Jim showed). Lots of possibilities--but chew one bit at a time. Once you get the hang of these we'll jump into Twitter mode down the road...

Mike Fry's PowerPoint discussion: ELIPresentationFryPP.ppt

Joel Kline's PowerPoint discussion: ELIPresentationKlineWikis.ppt

Barry Hill's discussion notes: ELIPresentationHillS08.pdf

Using card sorts for mental model analysis

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:25:11 -0500

Card sorts are an easy and effective way to peer into students' brains to see how they perceive your course material. Each person assimilates and organizes new information differently, and typical exams do not reveal how the learner "sees" things. There are several excellent techniques for eliciting mental models, but the card sort is easy to develop, administer, and analyze. Here is a PDF of the presentation from the CETL Teaching Matters discussion, and here is the website developed by B. Hill on mental model analysis in general. Call me with questions and if you would like to give it a whirl. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised at the results.