At the Spring 2011 Faculty In-Service on the Edwards Campus, I offered a session on “Enhancing Your Classroom with Technology.” I created a PowerPoint for this presentation which Suzanne Thompson has asked me to share with you on this blog.
To start the presentation, I showed a part of the famous “South Park” video that makes fun of those obsessed with the social networking site, Facebook. I wanted to acknowledge that I realize that some people hate technology or see it as a distraction, and others feel that they just have no time to figure it out. With the humor of the video, I hoped to create a relaxed environment. The video was on the PowerPoint so there was no fumbling around to pull it up.
During the session, I discussed the whys and hows of using Web Advisor and TaskStream. The difference between wikis and blogs were discussed as well as some creative ideas to incorporate them into a course. I created links to take us directly to one of my class blogs on Blogger and two wikis on PBWorks. We viewed a web game site, Quia that provides a way to reinforce course material in a different and engaging manner. This site has many free games already created by other teachers in just about every discipline. We took a look at some of the great resources available to CMC faculty such as Films on Demand. All of these tools are easily integrated onto BlackBoard so students and teachers have one access point.
Using PowerPoint made it very easy for me to link to all of these web components that I wanted to show the group. I am sharing this PowerPoint and hoping that you might be able to use it as a resource for exploring the many options that can make our classrooms more interesting and engaging. I feel that using technology helps us reach a variety of learning styles. We don’t want it to take over our lives as it did to poor Stan of South Park, but it can be a meaningful learning and teaching tool.
No comments:
Post a Comment