August Sandbox

In case you didn't get the email, there will be a Sandbox session offered on Friday, August 22, in the Arc Lab (south half of the computer lab where we met - by the window):

Time will be 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

As with the May sandbox, this is an opportunity for you to play around with the varoius tools we discussed, and to get hands-on support on any of those tools, if you like.

Post-workshop posting

Hi everyone!

Stacy and I really enjoyed the workshops last week, and we hope you got a lot out of them, too.

As we mentioned,, this blog will remain available. I've cleaned it up a bit and will continue to post resources and other things occasionally. Please feel free to add to the conversations here!

To start with: I just heard about this website, which links to free (and not-so-free) technology tools for teaching...

http://c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/index.html

This is exciting, yet unfamiliar and a little scary....

This is new to me. But blogs seem very well suited for student cultural reports, personal journals, or discussion forums on speaking points.

The evils of Powerpoint

I had a professor once who had a little too much fun with the kitschy features of PowerPoint. All of her graphics and photographs appeared with animations; all of her bullet points flew in one way or another. Moreover, the animations were often accompanied by sound effects: whooshes, squeals, machine-gun ratatatatats. The audio-visual equipment in the large lecture hall had a few glitches, and the sound effects would often come late, seconds after the graphics or text had appeared; thus, we were often subjected to surprise blasts of echoing gunfire sounds. I don't know for sure whether the professor did this to keep students awake and attentive. It certainly did wake me up a few times when I was getting drowsy, but more than once it interrupted the professor mid-sentence. You might think that the professor would have realized what a terrible distraction this was, but the sound effects and animations continued all semester.

Session 1, Day 1: Framing Conversations

Here are the notes from the whiteboard for the question

What challenges do you face/have you faced in the classroom? Things to work on?

motivating and engaging students
overplanning/underplanning: the need for flexibility, but not too much
successfully managing multi-level classes --> balancing info/level info to meet student needs
keeping student attention (and keep them from running off track!)
"unteaching" students - redirect/corect the knowledge they came into class with
getting students to talk/answer questions
balance in information-giving: how detailed do you get?
finding new ways to teach things
keep class from being too teacher-centered
setting goals and acomplishing them
structuring course information/content appropriately
planning/maximizing class time
knowing how YOUR course fits into a larger sequence of courses
integrating activities/assessments coherently
keeping your OWN attention
how to make it interesting/relevant
student knowledge retention

Welcome!

Welcome to the 2008 GSSW Teaching with Technology sessions!

More to come soon...