CTL Blog

TED and the CTL Teaching Team

The CTL Teaching Team events have really taken off during the past couple of weeks. We’ve had the CIS folks at both S&D and Red Mtn., sharing their expertise and teaching us all how to navigate the new interfaces of the MS Office 2007 suite.

On Monday Paul Valach introduced TED: Ideas Worth Spreading to a few of us. If you ever decide you want a guest speaker for your class, face-to-face or online, TED is the place to start looking. (more…)

IT for Education

In surfing for content to post to a variety of blogs this week, I came upon an interesting article that doesn’t necessarily relate to this week’s topics in any of my classes, but thought I would share anyway. (Besides, it’s my turn to present in my Recent Innovations in Ed Tech class this week)

Inside is an interesting reference on how technology is affecting instruction today. I like the fact that it focuses back on the teacher: (note that in the following quote, IT is referring to Information Technology and NOT Instructional Technology, but I think in the end it applies to both)

“IT is not a good substitute for good teaching. Good teachers are good with or without IT and students learn a great deal from them. Poor teachers are poor with or without IT and students learn little from them.”

Here’s the link: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/17/it

 

Alternatives to MS Word

As instructors continue to increase the number of online courses MCC offers, as well as continue to shift from paper to electronic homework submissions, we are beginning to notice the following two trends:
1. many of our students do not own MS Word; therefore,
2. an increasing number of our students electronically submit documents that are not in the “.doc” format.

There are a few easy suggestions to help with this issues.
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Web Media Update

I’ve prided myself for a long time on being a liaison for technology and people who aren’t technologists or those who at the very least tolerate it. However I still would like to contribute to the web development community regardless of whether they are developing e-Learning or educational software interfaces or not. With that said, I would like to emphasize that my first degree was in software engineering, so I am an engineer at heart. Therefore I will proceed to get a little tech-y…

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Retaining Our Students

We’ve tabulate the results from the ticket out from Fall 2007 Convocation. The following list groups the various "Retaining Students" ideas into trends that Naomi Story identified. Please read through and consider responding to this post. Things to consider:

  • Which of these suggestions will you do? when? where? how?
  • Which of these suggestions have you done in the past? How did they play out?
  • What other categories do you see emerging in this list of suggestions?

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Challenging our Students

We’ve tabulate the results from the ticket out from Fall 2007 Convocation. The following list groups the various "Challenging Students" ideas into trends that Naomi Story & Shelley Rodrigo identified. Please read through and consider responding to this post. Things to consider:

  • Which of these suggestions will you do? when? where? how?
  • Which of these suggestions have you done in the past? How did they play out?
  • What other categories do you see emerging in this list of suggestions?

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Beloit’s Mindset List

Beloit College’s annual listing of the mindset of incoming freshmen is yet another reminder we can’t work from those crusty yellow lecture notes (not that any of you do of course!). Personally, I always find the class assumptions behind these types of lists fascinating. These students have never had to roll down the car window? Somehow I think many of our students still have access to cars that require rolling down the window. However, I love the recognition of media as historian while discussing that these freshman only know JFK and Malcolm X from the films. Be sure to realign your thinking and check out the list!

Goodbye (Temporarily)

Good Morning All,

I’m writing a quick post to let all who read know that I will be ‘gone’ temporarily from the CTL as I will be completing the requirements for a Masters degree in the Ed Tech program at ASU on a sabbatical leave award. Everyone here has been very supportive of me doing this and I’m grateful for that. So grateful, in fact, that I couldn’t leave until the very last minute. Today is my last day here and I will be tying up some loose ends for a short while.

I will occasionally post a thing or two to the blogcast whilst I’m on leave as well as documenting my more routine educational experiences and findings at my other website, EduTechnorama. (I know it sounds goofy but I had to come up with something to call it)

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Reaching Out to Students

We’ve tabulate the results from the ticket out from Fall 2007 Convocation on Monday. The following list groups the various "Reaching Out to Students" ideas into trends that Naomi Story & Shelley Rodrigo identified. Please read through and consider responding to this post. Things to consider:

  • Which of these suggestions will you do? when? where? how?
  • Which of these suggestions have you done in the past? How did they play out?
  • What other categories do you see emerging in this list of suggestions?

(more…)