Every participant participating in the Summer Institute for Technology Enhanced Teaching and Learning is asked to make a 10-minute presentation on the final day–outlining some innovation that they are going to make to one of their courses. Friday is that final day . . . and I am in something of a muted panic. We've been introduced to so many different tools and techniques, and have heard so many interesting ideas for how to incorporate these things. I'm having trouble sorting through my thoughts because I can see so many wonderful possibilities.
Today, we discussed "student response systems" (aka "clickers"). I don't think that is something that I'll incorporate. At least now. I've asked students for many semesters whether or not I should adopt this technology, and the "no!" response is about 3:1. There may be professors who use SRS effectively, but it sounds as though this really needs to be thought out carefully. There are other higher impact things that I'd rather try.
A more interesting tool was nb.mit.edu. It is a web-hosted utility for annotating .pdfs. An instructor can upload a .pdf and then ask (small) groups of students to make comments and discuss aspects of the text in the margins. I will test this one out a bit more.
Other topics: discussion boards, blogs, wikis.
My colleague, Jane Read, and I also made a short video interview of SU map librarian, John Olson. We followed him around the Map Room with Jane's smartphone, and then uploaded the results to Blackboard. Maybe I'll post the interview later. It might be fun to have students make videos, but I'm trying to figure out the context and exactly what kind of learning it would promote in my courses.
Another informative day . . . but what to present on Friday? It has, however, inspired me to go back and re-do my syllabus in anticipation of really using Blackboard in a much more robust way once the fall courses go live in July. (Why can't they put them up now?)
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