Faculty Using Technology

Making Lecture Recordings Available through iTunes U

Thad Polk, LSA - Psychology, teaches in a large auditorium where an automated lecture capture system is not currently available. For several semesters, he has been using ProfCast to record his lectures and make the recordings available to students via iTunes U in CTools. From the Ctools course site, students can download recordings for playback on their personal computers or iPods. Students in Professor Polk’s classes appreciate having podcasts available and consider them a great tool for studying, reviewing, and catching up. They also enjoy the flexibility that the technology provides, allowing students to review past lectures whenever and wherever they prefer.

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Lecture Podcasting

Mika LaVaque-Manty, LSA - Political Science, began experimenting with lecture podcasts in 2006. He mainly uses podcasts in his large introductory courses, although he has used them at the 400-level, as well. He uses Profcast, a college-licensed, shareware application for the Mac. Profcast requires no additional equipment beyond a laptop because it resides on the same machine as the lecture presentation. It captures both the presentation slides--whether PowerPoint or Keynote--and syncs them with the audio. Professor LaVaque-Manty twice created a podcast-only lecture when he had to cancel the live lecture.

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Video Study Guides for Music Performance Classes

Amy Porter, School of Music, Theatre, and Dance, has created a series of DVDs that serve as study guides for her students. The DVDs include an overview of seminal flute pieces, providing details about their history, an analysis of performance, and practice strategies. Students use the DVDs both independently and to facilitate collaborative learning through study groups.

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Editing Wikipedia to Improve Writing to a General Audience

A short video describing this teaching strategy can be seen here.
A student example can be seen here.

As an alternative to a traditional research paper, Anne McNeil, LSA Department of Chemistry, incorporated a project utilizing Wikipedia.org to enhance her students' understanding of advanced topics in Chemistry and improve students’ scientific communication skills. Small groups of students in her graduate-level chemistry courses are challenged to collaborate on creating or revising public Wikipedia pages that will clearly communicate challenging concepts to both laypersons and experts.  Read more »

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Web-based Game for Teaching Library Research

In order to improve undergraduates' library research skills, Karen Markey, School of Information, created an online game entitled "Bibliobouts". This game takes students through different stages of the research process and enables them to receive feedback on their research techniques. This occurs both through accumulation of points throughout the game as well as conversations with instructors who can use the game to track the student's research process (which sources they considered, how they evaluated those sources, which sources they ultimately decided to use, etc.). For more information about this game, please visit http://bibliobouts.org/.

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