Instructional Technology

Devices such as the iPhone, Google's Android OS, and now the Palm Pre are being widely used by students and faculty. Universities all over the country are creating iPhone apps for their students, and some are requiring students have an iPhone (or iPod Touch) for use in their college experience. Join us to discuss how mobile devices are changing the way students and faculty can interact with education and their college or university.

In this session the presenter will discuss: What a Wiki is? Why wikis have gained popularity in education? How can a wiki be used as a web authoring tool for students to achieve active and collaborative learning in an online/hybrid learning setting. We'll also introduce programs for creating wikis, show the process of creating a wiki, and share some tips about how to use this tool effectively to achieve your course's learning objectives. Some wiki sites created by students for class work will be demonstrated.

The presenter will demonstrate the features of Adobe ConnectNow and share how this free online tool can help to enhance online or blended teaching and learning from four perspectives including visual instructional support through screen sharing between instructor and eLearners; efficient communication in various formats (text/visual/audio) through chat, webcam, whiteboard, and Internet telephony; active and collaborative learning by providing opportunities for eLearners to work together and technical ease (that is no additional software downloads required but just a web browser and the Adobe Flash Player).

ANGEL Agents are really not secret at all. But understanding how to use them and for what purpose can take a little detective work. The presenters have completed their investigation and rounded up some valuable time-saving ways to automate course tasks using ANGEL Agents. You will learn to build ANGEL Agents to: create a pop-up alert when students access designated content, enter grades automatically when a survey or other assignment is submitted, filter students who have not submitted an assignment and email them a reminder, deny access to course content during an exam, e-mail your external mailbox when specified content is accessed or submitted and more!

Some tips on providing rich constructivist learning opportunities in SL while avoiding the pitfalls. Topics include course setup, handling risk elements in SL class exploration, role playing, events, and activities. Ethical issues include griefing, abuse, false identities, and lewd behavior encountered in SL regions. Copyright and legal issues include using copyrighted materials, transaction logs, object identities, chat logs and trademarked materials. Presentation will be done in Second Life.

SoftChalk V5 provides an integrated suite of products to develop outstanding lessons that gives the online educator the power of a desktop application in combination with the resources of digital repositories, learning management systems, and other online resources (e.g., widgets, polls and surveys). We will look at the basics of adding interactive content along with exploring the new features in V5.

How do you know when and if copyright materials are legal to use in the classroom (online or face-to-face)? This session will explore important copyright issues using several higher education-related scenarios. The scenarios will be presented as a guide for participant consideration of when and if copyright materials may be used. The Copyright Act of 1976, fair use and the four factor analysis, the TEACH ACT, and multimedia guidelines will be discussed.

Web conferencing is used to conduct live meetings or presentations via the Internet. There are hundreds of different web conferencing tools out there ranging from $50,000 to free and it can be overwhelming to know where to start. I will show you the process we went through in choosing multiple systems that work for our varied needs across different departments. It is a wonderful world of strange names, so whether you DimDim, WIZIQ, Vroom, Yugma, oovoo, or Ilinc, you will learn to save money not only in fuel costs but also budget costs.

This presentation explores the use of virtual worlds to enhance student understanding of science. The main focus will be on Second Life, but other systems will be discussed. The presenter will focus on Science-related examples as well as several modules developed during the author's recent sabbatical. The session will illustrate the strengths and limitations of current virtual world technologies when designing interactive and collaborative activities for science students.

This presentation will cover the development of an online workshop on teaching with Blackboard. The presenters will share the project development framework, workshop tutorials, and participant feedback. The session will also include a discussion of challenges and triumphs related to course development, issues related to sustaining a self-paced workshop in comparison to traditional approaches, the integration of Softchalk Lesson Builder within Blackboard, and policy issues related to workshop attendance.
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