Technology Series @ ITLE

When applied appropriately, technology can enhance learning. But the term “technology” does not always refer to a piece of equipment. Just as often, the term is used in reference to a process or method. ITLE offers a set of 25 two-hour sessions to help you enhance your presentations using new technology tools. Currently, I'm teaching three of them:

• 24/7 Lessons: Online Narrated Presentation (myBrainshark)
• Add Visuals at Fingertips to Fuel Your Online Instruction (Jing)
• Using Wikis to Enhance Online Collaborative Learning (Wikispaces)

For detailed information about each tool, please read on:

24/7 Lessons: Online Narrated Presentation
Make your presentation and instruction available to all your students and peers 24/7. By adding voice to your PowerPoint slideshows, or even in combination with images, charts, and many more, you can give a true multimedia presentation that maximize the message transmission and optimize your audiences’ understanding of the topics. In this training, you will use myBrainShark to record and publish an introductory presentation related to your teaching or research. The end product will be a 5-minute online presentation with professional touches from your areas. Please feel free to bring some materials as the content.

Add Visuals at Fingertips to Fuel Your Online Instruction
Sometimes, a picture (or a video) is worth a thousand words. Visuals can be motivating, articulate, and extremely powerful in combination with narrations. Jing helps adding visuals to your teaching-learning transactions by capturing whatever is on your screen, statically or dynamically, and share them instantly to your audience. In this training, you will have hands-on experience to use Jing to produce a 5-minute narrated video. Please feel free to bring some materials related to your teaching or research as the content to demonstrate. For example, a chart, a concept map, a paragraph, and so on.

Using Wikis to Enhance Online Collaborative Learning
Providing collaborative learning opportunities is considered important to enhance student’s active learning. Wikis provide such a platform for faculty and students to co-write, co-edit, and co-publish subject matters all online. In this seminar, we are going to use Wikispaces, a free open technology tool, to develop an approach to learning in which students not only construct their own knowledge as a result of interaction with their environment (constructivism) but are also actively engaged in the process of constructing knowledge for their learning community (social constructivism). In this training, we will brainstorm, decide some potential uses, and develop a framework of a wiki. It’s preferable if you can bring some materials related to your courses as the content.