Adventures in Technology: E-LCC Conference

Last month it was a pleasure to attend and present at The E-Learning Consortium of Colorado Conference in Vail, Colorado. The conference is one of the best regional conferences providing opportunities for colleagues to share new techniques, delivery modes and technologies for teaching and learning in the classroom. Susan Herman and I had the added pleasure of presenting a new technology we have implemented in my classes and tutorials for Blackboard training on the student Early Alert Feature. Our joint session was presented using VoiceThread, an interactive technology for student interaction online. Instead of doing a welcome to this course power point I developed a VoiceThread introduction for my Interpersonal Communications and Humanities courses in which the syllabus and assignments were reviewed and each student had the opportunity to ask questions as well as introduce themselves on-line. I have provided the PowerPoint below for any interested in viewing the presentation. VoiceThread has provided many interactive opportunities for students, especially those who are attending the virtual campus courses. The session was so well received that The University of Denver has asked us to help them in training and guidance with VoiceThread technology. The opportunity to lead a webinar or face to face session for DU faculty is a possibility for the coming year.

VoiceThread presentation

View more presentations from Coloradomtn.

I also presented two other times at the conference with fellow Colorado Mountain College colleagues in a live performance of poetry and open house for Coloradoedu Island in Second Life. In the Second Life virtual presentations I was joined by Alice Bedard-Voorhees, Suzanne Thompson, and Margaret Maxwell. Despite technology problems with reliable Internet availability and a few wardrobe problems, (Alice kept losing her hair), it was a fun and exciting experience. Lindsey Royce was kind and brave enough to allow me to perform an oral interpretation of her poetry. Performing Lindsey’s poetry reminded me how appreciative I am of poets and their use of language and images through words and punctuation. Many years ago I performed poetry live with Actors Theatre of Louisville. One of my favorites was a tour that combined the poetry of e.e. cummings with several original poetry interpretations. I had forgotten how exciting it is to bring such focused work to life. We had a poet from Scotland arrive for the Second Life performance who shared his poetry as well, which I found to be very rewarding. He gave my avatar a line reader, which as the voice is interpreting the poetry the words flash across the screen. This is certainly nothing you have with real life poetry interpretations which makes it truly a multimedia experience.
The E-Learning Consortium Conference is one of those conference I will attend every year because of the learning, sharing and generally good time provided by the organizers and attendees. Plus, on top of all the learning, I won one of the trivia contests. I got lucky with questions that fell into one of my areas of expertise, a specialist in general information and mostly useless information!

"CMC Moving Ahead": Assessment In-Service 2010

Check out this SlideShare Presentation: Linda Suskie was a keynote presenter at the Spring Faculty In-Service May 4 and 5th, 2010.

Discipline groups accomplished pivotal work during this time, selecting two courses and outcomes for college-wide assessments.

"CMC Moving Ahead": Assessment In-Service 2010

View more presentations from Coloradomtn.

Please welcome the inaugural issue of the CMC’s very own literature and art journal, Rocky Mountain Reflections. The first issue features both written and visual art work, submitted by students, faculty, and staff.

Print copies are making their way to each campus. The journal is also available online at http://coloradomtn.edu/library/rmr. If you are interested in printing it out yourself, please see attached information.

It is our hope that the journal will become a home for all facets of creative arts, providing a forum for the Colorado Mountain College community to share fresh ideas, extraordinary stories, and unique visions. Rocky Mountain Reflections addresses and fulfills many of CMC’s college-wide learning outcomes and adds another program to our growing roster of measures to increase our students’ personal and academic success.

Rocky Mountain Reflections will be published twice a year, at the end of spring and fall semesters. The success of the journal will greatly depend on your continuous support. Please encourage students to submit their work for publication. We are accepting submissions year-round: http://coloradomtn.edu/library/rmr/submit/.

TESOL Conference

Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)

April 5th, 2010.

We are all busy at CMC and finding time to attend a conference can be a challenge. Having just returned from the national TESOL conference in Boston, I am reminded of the value. Learning new approaches, getting new ideas and networking with colleagues in my field is invaluable for my work in both ESL and pre college English classes. Here is a glimpse of what I gained by attending.

First, from “Beyond This I Believe” presented by Kate Spike, Director of Bowling Green State University, I learned how students are using StoryCorps, NPR, AARP and Frontline to enhance speaking and listening skills and learn about the culture of the United States. This particular project was on Aging. Students first did research using the following websites. Next, they visited the local senior center where they were matched with a partner whom they interviewed and recorded. They then created a story which they presented.



Useful Websites
StoryCorps http://www.storycorps.org/
National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/
NPR StoryCorps: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4516989
AARP: http://www.aarp.org/
List of resources on Aging http://www.fanlight.com/webresources.php
Frontline Living Old http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/livingold/view/
Do you Speak American? http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/map/map.html/

Second, along with other CMC instructors, I visited Harvard’s Bridge program. Each section of the program was described in detail and we each learned of a different aspect. This flowchart outlines this progressive and forward thinking program Harvard has in place for its employees.


Besides three days of conferencing, I had a chance to see why Bostonians are so proud of their city.

I am so thankful to CMC for allowing me the opportunity to attend this conference.
Jennifer le Roux
Professor Adult Basic and Developmental Education, Alpine Campus.

E-Learning Consortium of Colorado Conference

 Keynoter: Rovy Branon from ADL Co-Lab

Hi All,

I attended the ELCC Conference on April 14 - 16 in Vail with several CMC colleagues: Daryl Yarrow, Susan Herman, Gabe Aguilar, Suzanne Thompson, Kathy-Kiser Miller,our Emeritus Peter J, and Louis Beatty (one of the two elite technoraties with an Ipad). This remains my favorite Rocky Mountain conference because it is by and for two and four-year colleagues for peer-teaching sessions by both the tech support and instructional side of the house.

Our own college was active in those contributions. Susan and Kathy gave a great session Friday morning on the the use of Voicethread to create a faculty tutorial and for use by learners in two of Kathy's classes.

One inviting aspect of this conference is that it is a safety net for presenting teaching and learning technologies in progress. Hotel networks are notorious for their lack of dependability, especially with hands-on lab sesssions. Kathy, Suzanne, and I were involved in two presentations in Second Life that had big challenges, but the celebration of poetry month in Second Life out did the challenges. We had readers both in-world and from the conference lab.

Thank you, Margaret Maxwell, for reading your wonderful work from Aspen in-world. Thank you, Kathy Kizer-Miller for bringing Lindsey Royce's work to the world, and thank you Suzanne for sharing your talent. As I tweeted that day at elcc#10: "The poets are reading. Good medicine :)."

And a little about the poetry event at Colorado EduIsland. The community colleges of Colorado have been meeting for about a year on this shared virtual space to determine policy, practice, appearance and events by single schools or across schools. Rhonda Dove (ProCo Clarity) is an extraordinary builder and has given a lion's share to helping the community come into practice. Cheryl Comstock (Ize Messmer) has given an enormous amount of time to leadership and communication. Kathy Kizer-Miller (Miranda Menjou) has been one or our invaluable participants as a faculty member who is has quite a bit of experience using Second Life as one aspect of classes she teaches. I have not included all steering committee members here, but this collaborative experience is a hopeful one, and we think we are just starting to see it taking off as another opportunity to meeting and learning across the miles.

The next celebration of poetry month is this week on Colorado EduIsland at 10 MDT on Wed. This group will be already attending a global online conference and the celebration is one of the sessions. Again, there will be scheduled poets and an open mic. Please let me know if you would like to be listed as a scheduled poet.

As a last note, I tend to listen to the keynoters at this conference to talk about the cutting edge. I came away with a couple concepts: Faculty Entrepreneurialism and "The University of One" and more talk about augmented reality and the use of phone to read compacted information in QR (scanner) codes through the phone cameras. I spent Saturday playing with the QR and wrote about it here With many students having camera phones, they could be used to construct a campus scavenger hunt :).

So there you have it, loved this conference. Stay tuned to more about it from our various attendees :).

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Adjunct Faculty News!

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