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2009 Summer Institute: Enhancing Teaching and Learning with Technology

May 18 - 22, repeated May 26 - 29

Want to encourage collaboration among your students? Improve communication? Explore alternatives to traditional methods of assessment? Infuse your teaching with active-learning strategies? Technology can help you to do all of that—and more. Find out how at the 2009 Summer Institute.

Introduction

Powerful interactive technologies are creating new models of instruction that enhance our ability to communicate and collaborate, create and manipulate, model and simulate, calculate and analyze, and visualize and present, while cost-effectively easing the barriers of distance, place, and time. Such technologies are the focus of the workshops comprising the 2009 Summer Institute, Enhancing Teaching and Learning with Technology.

The Summer Institute consists of a series of workshops offered twice in May (May 18 - 21 and again the following week, May 26 - 29). Make your own custom schedule; come to one workshop, all workshops, or however many you choose. At each workshop you'll have opportunities to learn about a particular technology and its pedagogical implications and applications, while interacting with invited Boise State faculty as they share their tips, techniques, strategies for incorporating the technology into teaching. In nearly all workshops, you'll be able to engage in hands-on practice, assisted by staff from Academic Technologies.

Refreshments will be provided, as will opportunities for you to meet with your colleagues from across campus to discuss teaching with technology. Best of all, it's FREE!

Registration

Seating is very limited for most workshops, so please register as soon as possible. To register, click here to browse a list of all workshops. Click on a workshop title in the list to view a full description and to register for that workshop.

NOTE: Each workshop is offered twice, in two consecutive weeks. Please double-check the dates of each workshop you select to ensure that you enrolling for the one offered on the date you'll be able to attend.

Workshop Descriptions

Collaboration with TeamSpot Collaborative activities can increase student learning while providing meaningful opportunities to develop important teamwork skills. Collaborative workstations running TeamSpot enable small groups of students to wirelessly share files and web sites with one another, cut and paste between computers, share their screens with one another, and jointly create documents, Web sites, rich media, and other learning artifacts. Through hands-on experience, you learn how TeamSpot works and how it can enhance your students’ collaborative activities. More important, this session will teach you how pedagogical principles of good group assignments can be employed to maximize the effectiveness of your students’ learning experiences. A few of your Boise State colleagues will discuss their students’ experiences with collaborative activities, sharing with you and other participants the lessons learned from their use of TeamSpot collaborative workstations.

Developing Rich Media with Camtasia If it’s on your computer screen, Camtasia can record it, enabling you to capture in digital video a series of PowerPoint slides, navigation of a Web site, the steps involved in creating graphs from a spreadsheet, or just about any other computer task or process you might imagine. You can add audio and video to what you’ve captured on-screen (for example, adding video of you discussing the content of PowerPoint slides). Interactivity can be added in the form of quizzes, “callouts” to highlight important content, and clickable “hot spots” that trigger feedback or other actions. Camtasia can be used to create tutorials, simulations, self-study aids, and a number of other rich-media materials. This session will teach you how to use Camtasia through guided, hands-on experience, beginning with a basic narrated PowerPoint presentation and progressing through interactive quizzes, “hot spots,” and other more advanced elements. As we cover each of the capabilities of Camtasia, we will also discuss how these features might be used in pedagogically effective ways discuss examples of different methods for using Camtasia to enhance teaching and learning.

Enhancing Teaching and Learning with Google Apps Want to learn how to use Google Apps to engage your learners and stay connected with people and events while becoming more productive? Barbara Schroeder, Education Technology, will demonstrate some quick and easy ways to use Google Docs, Google Sites, and Blogger to create authentic and efficient learning opportunities. You’ll have opportunities to practice using these tools to collaborate, create Web sites, and explore other applications of Google Apps for teaching and learning.

Fostering Collaboration, Active Learning, and Communication with Wikis and Blogs These two staples of social networking and the Web 2.0 environment—wikis and blogs—offer an innovative, unique way for students and instructors to interact with course materials and with each other. Though similar to web-based discussion boards, wikis and blogs can enhance online communication by providing a more robust, inspiring canvas for authors while fostering a greater sense of content ownership among both authors and readers. This session will focus on helping students achieve your teaching objectives while they use wikis and blogs to engage with course content and others in the course. We will highlight the findings of a year-long Boise State study on using wikis and blogs in the classroom, including examples of course activities, best practices, and cautionary tales presented by some of the Boise State faculty who participated in the study. You will also participate in a hands-on session to plan learning activities suitable for wikis and blogs, and also set up a wiki, blog, or both for your own use later on.

Here, There, and Everywhere with Videoconferencing Want to bring a guest lecturer to your class from another university without springing for a plane ticket? Are travel budgets trimmed to zero yet you need to bring candidates to campus to be interviewed? Do your students need to collaborate on a group project but are scattered around the valley, the state, or the world? Need a simple way to hold virtual office hours for students in an Internet course? Videoconferencing offers a variety of technological responses to each scenario, ranging from virtual meetings with participants at multiple remote locations to collaboration with a colleague on the other end of campus to holding virtual office hours to support an online course. This session will introduce you to the range of uses that videoconferencing makes possible, while also providing opportunities to explore how videoconferencing can help you meet a number of instructional and administrative needs.

Lights! Camera! Classroom! Action! Classroom-capture technology turns lectures and classroom activities into streaming video that can be accessed on the Internet at any time from nearly anywhere, in formats ranging from fully-produced video using four cameras and a control-room operator to simple automated captures using a single camera. Students can view the resulting videos on computers, but also on iPods, cell phones, and other mobile devices, simply by following a link posted automatically to your Blackboard course site. While viewing the video, students can pause, rewind, fast-forward, or jump instantly to a selected portion. This session will introduce you to the classroom-capture technology available on campus, while also providing opportunities to learn about and discuss with Boise State faculty how the technology can be integrated into your teaching (for instance, by moving lectures online to free up class time for group work or discussion, by capturing presentations by guest lecturers, by creating remedial study materials, or by creating test-preparation materials for students).

More than Blackboard: What Academic Technologies Can Do for You Learn about the many services Academic Technologies offers to help you use instructional technology in your teaching, including Blackboard services, consulting on and creation of multimedia teaching materials for the classroom or Web, web site and application development, video and audio capture of lectures, development of rich-media teaching materials, and more. We will also present an easy-to-use tool for requesting Academic Technologies services from your office or home and for tracking the status of service requests.

Podcasting and Pedagogy With the university's new podcasting service—Boise State on iTunes U—faculty and students can distribute audio or video podcasts for playback on personal computers, cell phones, or portable media players. This session will focus both on how to create a podcast and how to make effective use of podcasts for teaching and learning. Through guided, hands-on experience, you will learn the basic skills to create audio podcasts, while also exploring ideas for effective uses of podcasting for particular types and styles of teaching and learning, including examples drawn from the experiences of several Boise State faculty. You will learn about techniques, tips, and strategies arising from your colleagues’ experiences, and have an opportunity to discuss podcasting with them and other participants.

PowerPoint: Beyond the Bullets Long a favored presentation tool in both business and education, PowerPoint can do more for you--and for your students--than provide a bulleted list of speaking points to accompany a lecture. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll explore ways to take PowerPoint to the next level, using it to create flexible, compelling, and robust presentations that go beyond facilitating presentation to facilitating interaction. Topics include the use of the master template, hyperlinks, triggers, rich media, and non-linear design to create dynamic and interactive presentations.

Why Clickers in the Classroom? Wouldn’t it be nice to get immediate feedback from students about what they are learning? You can do that -- and more -- with student-response systems (AKA "clickers"). Clickers are wireless electronic devices, resembling a TV remote, that enable students to respond to questions in the classroom. Faculty can immediately tally and display the results and then use them to inform class discussion and refine the focus of remaining class time. Clickers allow for a variety of question types to assess student understanding and can be used in a number of inventive ways to engage students and support active learning. They can even be used to give quizzes and take attendance! Among other things, participants in this workshop will learn about using clickers with PowerPoint and other uses of clickers in the classroom. Additional topics include research on clickers and the emerging best practices for using clickers to engage students in learning, and you'll have opportunities to hear from other Boise State faculty about their experiences using clickers.