2008 CRLT TTI Grant Projects

Link to CRLT TTI Grant Projects 2004, [1] 2005, [2] 2006, [3] 2007, [4] 2009, [5]2010, [6] 2011 [7]

• Creating a course to engage students in critical thinking and collaborative writing projects

  Amy Carroll, Assistant Professor of Americal Culture and Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, LSA (amysara@umich.edu [8])

  Professor Carroll’s project focuses on re-designing her course, Latino/Latina Literature of the United States: Borders and Circuits. The course will employ various technology tools that encourge students to think and work outside the box about the readings. Students will use technology tools to comment on each other’s writings, share and exchange thoughts, and archive the final group projects.

• Creating a Community of Listeners

  Mark Clague, Assistant Professor of Musicology, School of Music, Associate Director, American Music Institute, Faculty Associate, American Culture Program (claguem@umich.edu [9])

  Professor Clague's project focuses on improving a pre-existing online listening blog tool (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/usmusiclistening [10]) by building interactive enhancements that encourage student-to-student engagement, interaction and collaboration. Students will be able to comment and build upon the observations of their peers and in doing so build a community of listeners within a large lecture course. This interactivity is intended to increase intrinsic student motivation to participate, while enhancing intellectual and artistic growth.

• Smart Phones for “Just-in-Time” Teaching

  Terry Joiner, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases, Medical School (tjoiner@umich.edu [11])

  Professor Joiner’s project is to experiment with mobile technology, such as smart phones, for instructional uses. Preceptors commonly cite that the demands of their clinical responsibilities (evaluating and treating patients) make it difficult for them to locate and employ curricular resources in their teaching. The project will provide pediatric primary care faculty preceptors with smart phones loaded with, and/or linked to online curricular materials. The smart phones will enhance the preceptor’s ability to access evidence-based curricular materials on an as-needed basis and increase moments for “Just-In-Time” teaching. In addition, preceptors will be asked to record portions of a student's history and physical while with a patient. Using an adaption of the Brief Structured Observation, faculty will provide students with feedback on their performance and students will be able to do self-assessments of their history-taking and physical examination skills.

• Animation for explanations of disease processes

  Preetha P Kanjirath, Clinical Assistant Professor of Dentistry, Department of Oral Medicine/Pathology/Oncology, School of Dentistry, (pkanjira@umich.edu [12])

  Professor Kanjirath’s project focuses on developing modules using animated sequences to teach the predoctoral dental and dental hygiene students. Many dental students are visual learners and they will be able to better assimilate and synthesize the material when presented in a logical and flowing pictorial manner. The learning module with pictorial representation of disease processes will facilitate the assimilation of this data and bring to life the mechanism of the complex etiopathogenesis of the devastating effect that diabetes has in the oral cavity.

• A Wiki for GSIs to exchange information and improve student-learning experience

  James D. Morrow, Professor of Political Science, LSA and Research Professor, Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research (jdmorrow@umich.edu [13])

  Professor Morrow developed a Wiki site for the course GSIs to exchange information and accumulate their best practices for the discussion sections of his popular science course. The Wiki site not only allows experienced GSIs to transmit their knowledge and experience to one another and to current new GSIs, but also serves as an archived resource. The Wiki also provides a repository for effective teaching materials that were handed down previously in paper form. The Wiki will ensure that new and future GSIs have valuable resources for teaching discussion sections.

• Employing 3-D imagery to engage students in composing text/message innovatively

  Thylias Moss, Professor of English Language, LSA, and Professor of Art and Design, School of Art and Design, (thyliasm@umich.edu [14])

  Professor Moss’s project exposes students to 3-D imagery for sentence and text structure. The 3-D tool will enable students to go beyond words and text and the linear structure of sentence to explore and illustrate meanings and relationships in a 3-D environment. For example, by placing text and image on different planes in a 3D environment, other possibilities for meanings and relationships emerge. Using Flash tools, students will be able to actively manipulate their texts and images.

• Using Web 2.0 technology to enhance students’ understanding of complex relationships

  Susan Waltz, Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy (swaltz@umich.edu [15])

  Professor Waltz's project integrates web 2.0 technologies into teaching. The course is organized around a concept map that identifies the main components of the policy universe of human rights. A series of wiki-projects provide opportunities for students to explore these elements as they relate to contemporary problems and to expand their knowledge by constructing case studies with individual and collaborative components. The wiki-technology engages students in a shared learning experience, and by permitting successive edits to be tracked, it provides opportunity to review progress and reflect on the learning process. At the end of the semester, Professor Waltz will gather student input to improve the concept map, which she plans to use as the conceptual framework for a future textbook.

  Professor Waltz prepared a screencast video to help students understand what was involved in the wiki project:
  http://www.screencast.com/users/SW-Jing/folders/Default/media/5ae712fa-6af6-4a81-88fd-b541a87a1c26 [16]

• An Interactive “Map” of the Atlantic World

  Warren Whatley, Professor of Economics, Professor of AfroAmerican and African Studies, LSA (wwhatley@umich.edu [17])

  Professor Whatley is building an interactive GIS/Google Earth map of the transatlantic slave trade and the Atlantic world. The map will animate the movement of 34,000 slave voyages between 1500 and 1900 found in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD). Voyages will be viewable over layers of historical maps and information that serve to highlight the interaction between the slave trade and the socio-political-cultural evolution of the Atlantic world. The map will be a living document that comes bundled with tools to facilitate participatory learning and the development of new content by both faculty and students. Users will be able to access content by selecting locations on maps or timelines.

  Link to Prof. Watley's PowerPoint presentation. [18]