This year’s conference focused, in part, on the role that technology is playing in faculty development—on the ways in which the availability of certain types of technologies has allowed faculty to explore new ways of achieving their goals in the classroom and often in their own scholarship. Faculty at all career stages, from brand-new to long-term, have shared their own discoveries.

Thank you for attending the 2010 Educational Technology Conference held on Thursday May 13th.  If you have not completed the conference evaluation, can you please  spend about 10 minutes giving us your feedback by visiting: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZFHBRYV
Your feedback will allow us to better plan and organize future conferences.

Thank you for your cooperation
Conference Committee

 

View the Keynote by Ken Udas and Panel Discussion by Malcom Smuts, Cheryl Nixon and Lisa Link

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l0mea5D7VA]

Watch conference sessions on iTunes U

 

 

 

Engaging Learners with Blackboard and Wikis

Josh Reid;  Lynnell Thomas; Teddy Chocos
Facilitator: Mark Lewis

Presenters will share the ways in which they use an online course presence to engage learners: Josh Reid on strategies for addressing students with different needs and backgrounds in Blackboard; Lynnell Thomas on how she has been using Blackboard discussion tools to engage students outside of the classroom; Teddy Chocos on the ways in which she has been using a wiki to create community in her courses.
View classroom capture of this session

 

Educational Technology and Faculty Development: Personal Accounts/Multiple Tools a. Blackboard and Camtasia as Learning Tools

David Pruett, Music

Facilitator: Ellie Kutz

In this presentation, David Pruett will explore how he has used Blackboard to complement in-class learning, including the use of interconnected webpages (html) within Blackboard’s course shell, posted readings, streaming audio and video, the online gradebook, and possibilities for webpage enhancement using background images, animated gifs, and eye-catching fonts and icons. He will also discuss his experiences as a participating member of UMB’s pilot program for Camtasia, a lecture recording software that is has proven especially useful for students with disabilities and students who have English as a second language.
View classroom capture of this session

Social Technologies Journey: Blogging and Tweeting the Course and in Turn Shaping My Research Agenda

Gonzalo Bacigalupe, Counseling and School Psych

Facilitator: Ellie Kutz

In this presentation, Gonzalo Bacigalupe will walk the audience through his e-learning journey, highlighting turning points as well as a few technological, pedagogical, and professional breakthroughs that may make a difference: from the early proprietary HTML based UMASS Boston LMS to Blackboard and now freeing himself from Blackboard as the main tool to teach a whole online, hybrid, and on campus course; his movement from static PPT to fluid Prezis and from email listservs to rich Twitter exchanges.
View classroom capture of this session

 

Wikis, Digital Writing, and Student/Faculty Learning

Alex Mueller, English; Peter Taylor, Critical and Creative Thinking

Facilitator: Ellie Kutz

Alex Mueller observes that our digital culture of blogging and wiki-writing demands collaboration at a rate never witnessed before, but teachers,are often hesitant to engage with such cooperative literacies. He asks: “Can the dynamic and productive relationship between students and teachers in the classroom be replicated in hypertextual environments, in which digital writers respond to shifting, and possibly unreliable, texts in cyberspace?” As a response to this challenge, he has asked students in his “History of the English Language” course to write Wikipedia-like pages on linguistic issues, debates, and trends ranging from the Great Vowel Shift, dictionary writing, Official English, and texting. By having students produce these texts on the course wiki with their peers, he has been forced to confront and evaluate the volatile and collaborative nature of digital writing, and he will share the ways in which this experience both harrowed and delighted him.

Peter Taylor will draw examples and lessons from his use of wikis over the last four years for teaching problem-based learning, student reflective practice portfolios, assignment drop boxes and course portfolios, institutional memory and information sharing, program newsletters, recording the process and products of workshops, seminars, and courses, assembling materials for a handbook on teaching, annotated bibliography entries by students, taking notes, and much more.
View classroom capture of this session

Engaging Students in Large Classes: Multiple Strategies

Marietta Schwartz, Chemistry; Tara Ashok, Biology and Anthropology

Presenters will share the multiple tools and strategies they use in teaching large classes. These include, for Marietta, online web-based learning, Adobe Presenter, document cameras, and I-clickers.
(She discusses her use of these tools in her blog at http://blogs.umb.edu/mariettaschwartz/.)

Tara Ashok uses I-clickers and Blackboard for teaching large classes. She has developed rich multi-media materials using Director Software and has made documentary films to engage her students in learning complex concepts. She has also used Blackboard successfully for conducting proctored and password-protected on-campus exams for a class of 100 students.
View classroom capture of this session

 

Researching and Theorizing Students’ Experiences with Technology- Online Learning for Low-Tech Learners and Learning Models and Educational Technologies

Brenda D’Alotto, Su Theriault Institute for Community Inclusion; Varghese George, Management

Facilitator: Kitty Galaisis

Despite national, state, and local technology initiatives in K-12 school systems, many teachers remain relatively and unaware of the teaching resources available online and Early Childhood Educators even more frequently lack basic computer skills. Presenters will discuss the challenges faced in offering online and hybrid courses for this population, along with information gathered from surveys and interviews implemented in an attempt to better understand the complications our students face, and thereby develop a system of supports to improve students’ future experiences and success. Despite their increasing sophistication, linking learning models, such as the ‘Community of Inquiry,’ to learning outcomes in online or hybrid courses has not been easy.

The field of technological innovation offers alternative models that can help us to understand the ways to support learning-related communication and achieve desired outcomes, focusing on the ways in which communication can be used for coordination, information, and synergy. Educational technologies serve these three types of communication very differently, which should influence academic designs and institutional planning. Implications for administrators, educators, students, and researchers will be discussed.
View classroom capture of this session

Varghese George Presentation

Integrating Video in Courses Through Screen Capture

Steve Ackerman, Biology Ed Romar, Management
Facilitator: Mary Simone

Presenters have been participating in a pilot project to use screen capture technology (Camtasia) in their courses. Camtasia allows faculty to capture whatever is on their laptops screen along with their voices as they talk about PowerPoint slides or images, creating an mp3 file that can easily be uploaded to Blackboard, iTunes U, a wiki, or a website. Steve and Ed will demonstrate this tool and talk about its potential for enhancing students’ learning.
View classroom capture of this session

 

Innovative use of Web- based Technologies

Amy Todd, Anthropology; Lakshmi Srinivas; Sociology Gene Shwalb, Educational Technology and Instructional Design

Facilitator: Irene Yukhananov

Presenters will demonstrate their innovative use of online video technologies in the classroom: Amy Todd on her use of YouTube videos as a resource for student research in cultural and linguistic anthropology; Lakshmi Srinivas on using YouTube to engage students in cultural critique in sociology courses; Gene Shwalb on the use of Viddler as a video tool for building engaging student assignments.
View classroom capture of this session

Vendors

Representatives from Adobe, Apple,and I-Clicker, were available to offer brief presentations about how their products work for teaching and research.