Faculty Instructional Technology Summer Institute

We are preparing our students to enter a world that is technologically complex and economically competitive. Traditional instructional approaches in which teachers attempt to transmit information to students are ill-suited for preparing them to participate in a knowledge-creating society.

In recent years, the learning sciences have reached a consensus on a number of basic findings that have important implications for the classroom. This session will focus on several of these findings, including: engaging the experiences and knowledge that each student brings to the classroom; helping students acquire a deep knowledge of a subject area that is organized in a useful way; and helping students understand, evaluate, and take responsibility for their own learning.

With these findings in mind, we will explore examples of how technology can facilitate improved learning in the classroom. We’ll pay particular attention to the value of developing online learning communities that are focused on knowledge building.

Dr. Ellis’ presentation will be followed by a period of open discussion during which participants are invited to share their views and ask questions.

UNH IT upgraded Blackboard from version 8 to version 9 on May 23, 2010. Blackboard 9 provides the features and tools available in version 8, plus significant enhancements to the user interface, new social-learning tools, and easier navigation throughout. The Blackboard 9 interface has been redesigned for an intuitive Web 2.0 look and feel. In the new version, instructors can drag and drop course content, turn edit mode ON (instructor view) or OFF (student view), and customize their course home page. The redesigned Assignment tool replaces the Digital Dropbox, making it easier to share documents. This session will give you a brief overview of these and other new features.

What can you use and how can you use it? A panel of UNH faculty will join USNH intellectual property experts to explore how teaching online courses and sharing digital information on the Web is shaping the legal landscape as it relates to privacy, copyright, and intellectual property law. Learn about resources on the UNH campus that can help you navigate these troubled waters.

This session will introduce you to the Content tab in Blackboard. The Blackboard content management system is a great way to store files and documents in a secure location and then create links to them from within your Blackboard courses and organizations. You can reuse course content from previous semesters, share curriculum with colleagues, and link to the same file in multiple sections or multiple Blackboard courses without having to upload it over and over. You can also share files with colleagues outside UNH and collaborate on grants and research projects. In the Blackboard content system, your files are secure and available to you from any networked location.

At the end of this session, you will know how to:

• Navigate to content areas in the content management system.
• Add files and documents to your content collection.
• Link files and documents to your Blackboard course or organization.
• Transfer existing content from a course or organization to your content collection.
• Set up a Web folder that lets you edit files on your desktop and save the changes directly to your content collection.

The enhanced Blackboard 9 Assignment tool replaces the old Digital Dropbox you used in Blackboard 8. Using the Bb Assignments tool, you can assign a variety of projects, collect files, grade assignments, and provide feedback to your students. Features include the ability to allow multiple attempts, the choice to grade or not to grade work, and the ability to collect student work without using Email. Students can attach multiple files to their submissions and the grades you assign are automatically added to the Blackboard Grade Center. This session will also explore the Blackboard plagiarism prevention tool, SafeAssign.

At the end of this session, you will know how to:

• Create assignments.
• Give feedback on assignments.
• Grade assignments.
• Retrieve Digital Dropbox files you had stored in Blackboard 8.

Blackboard workgroups let you organize your students into collaborative teams for study, research, and review. You can use the enhanced Blackboard 9 Groups tools to enable blogging and journaling, provide a protected venue for file exchange, and support private communication by Email, chat, and discussion. You can even allow your students to create their own workgroups to facilitate self-selected study groups.

At the end of this session, you will know how to:

• Create workgroups singly and in batches.
• Populate workgroups manually, automatically, and through self-enroll.
• Allow students to create self-study workgroups.

Blackboard 9 gives you several new ways to support student reflection, and highlight and display student work. With the new blogging and journal tools, you can create interactions between yourself and individual students, between a student and his or her peers, or between groups of students enrolled in separate workgroups.

The ePortfolio tool lets both faculty and students create portfolios of their work. Faculty can use this tool to support assignments or track program requirements. Students can use it to support job or internship searches and to highlight their own accomplishments.

At the end of this session, you will know how to:

• Create a blog.
• Create a journal.
• Comment or reflect on blog and journal entries.
• Access and create ePortfolios.

Self-paced study quizzes can be useful to students as well as instructors. Instructors can use them to test comprehension and retention. Students can use them as an online study guide or for self-assessment. This session will focus on creating and managing self-paced study tools. We’ll explore best practices for using Blackboard quizzes and the benefits of using them to track student learning and prompt student reflection.

At the end of this session, you will know how to:

• Create a self-paced study quiz in a Blackboard course.
• Create a variety of Blackboard question types.
• Choose appropriate quiz settings.
• Use best practices for administering online quizzes.

Learn how the improved Blackboard Grade Center can help you monitor and assess students’ progress in your courses. The Blackboard Grade Center provides expanded features like weighting and categorizing grades and assignments, dropping the lowest grade, calculating grade values, and managing grade book views.

At the end of this session, you will know how to:

• Use the My Grades tool to access grades and feedback as a student would.
• Navigate and organize the Grade Center.
• Use columns to hide, sort, and calculate grades.
• Enter and manage grades, including grading test and assignment submissions.

Hear from faculty who have made the leap to online teaching and learning. Faculty from the 2009 Summer Distance Learning pilot and UNH’s first January Term share their experiences and talk about what works and what doesn’t work when teaching in online formats. Learn about the tools and techniques they are using, and the resources on hand to support them. You’ll also hear from UNH students about their experience in this year’s January Term courses.

Working with rich media can enhance students’ learning experience and help you achieve your instructional objectives. But rich media assignments are tricky and sometimes difficult to structure—difficult for you to design and difficult for students to complete successfully. The Parker Media Lab was established to help both faculty and students work through this process.

In this session, you will become the students. You will work in teams and collaborate to complete a rich media project. Then you’ll have an opportunity to see how other teams handled the same assignment.

At the end of this session, you will know, from the students’ perspective:

• What it takes to complete a rich media project or assignment for a course.
• The steps required to plan, execute, and deliver a rich media assignment.
• What support and services are available to students at the Parker Media Lab.

At the end of this session, you will know, from the faculty perspective:

• The dangers involved in assigning rich media projects.
• Best practices for assigning rich media projects.
• How to evaluate rich media projects.

Today’s students live in a media-saturated world. When faculty begin to integrate rich media into assignments and course materials, they are sometimes overwhelmed by all the different dimensions of the process. In this panel, you’ll hear from UNH faculty who have worked with media as a part of their courses. They’ll address the benefits and rewards they realized, as well as the risks and barriers they encountered. You’ll also learn about some of the resources available to you at UNH should you decide to go down the “rich media road.”

The Web can support many types of productive communication for faculty and students. New tools can support the rapid development of communication and assignments. You’ll learn about some of these tools so you can decide which ones you want as part of your instructional tool kit, and which ones are not a good fit for your instructional objectives.

Through a series of brief demonstrations and case studies, we’ll investigate how some of these tools can be harnessed to increase student engagement. We’ll look at ways these tools can create new opportunities for teaching in inventive ways.

Topics include:

• Synchronous exchange
• Web conferencing
• Social networking

The Web is also a valuable resource for creating, storing, and sharing learning objects. In this session, we’ll examine how Web-based tools can help you create your own content, find content developed by others, and collaborate with colleagues to create new teaching tools.

Through a series of brief demonstrations and case studies, we’ll look at ways to share learning objects, publish course content, share and edit images to increase engagement in your courses, and how to make your course preparation easier and more collaborative.

Topics include:

• Shared learning objects
• Rich-media distribution platforms
• Sharing and editing images
• Content repositories

Email is so…yesterday. Students now live with their iPODs and iPADs and smart phones and Blackberries in their hands 24/7. Is this an untapped opportunity for faculty to reach out to students “where they live” and make course content more easily accessible and more relevant? Hear from faculty, administrators, and experts about what social media has to offer higher education, and how faculty can assess the risks and benefits involved in using these new media to engage and communicate with students.

Students want to be heard. One way to keep them engaged in the classroom is to let them “speak.” This session will focus on the eInstruction classroom polling system, better known on campus as “the clickers.” We’ll look at how this technology has been used on this and other campuses and explore best practices. Then you’ll have an opportunity to let yourself be heard in an interactive, hands-on activity using the clickers.

At the end of this session, you will know how to:

• Build an eInstruction lesson with questions.
• Engage lesson questions with and without PowerPoint.
• Manage display options to encourage discussion.
• Engage verbal questions.

With the growth of interest in distance learning, lecture capture has become a hot topic on many campuses. At UNH, some faculty have been experimenting with a lecture capture tool called Panopto. Panopto lets faculty record lectures--including video, screen capture, and audio--that can be delivered to students via Blackboard anywhere, anytime. Panopto offers features like note-taking, indexing, and searchable content.

At the end of this session, you will know:

• How faculty on this campus are using lecture capture.
• Best practices for delivering lectures online.
• How to adapt traditional classroom lectures to the online environment.

In this session, we’ll explore the basics of information design and how you can apply them to your PowerPoint presentations. We’ll identify best practices and explore how to use PowerPoint to keep your students interested and engaged in the classroom. Then we’ll talk about simple presentation techniques that can deepen student comprehension and increase knowledge retention.

At the end of this session, you will know how to:

• Work with master slides, guides, and color schemes.
• Manage slides by duplicating and sorting.
• Add internal and external hyperlinks.
• Add images and sound files.

In the past year, the University Library has started to develop the UNH Scholars’ Repository, a place to archive and provide access to faculty, student, and institutional scholarly work, including data sets, research materials, reports, and published findings. How is this repository different from other content management systems in use on campus? How does it relate to traditional journal publishing? How will it promote faculty research to a wider audience?

The repository is a storage, search, and retrieval system that will enable the University to archive and promote scholarly work and ensure continued access to and preservation of that work for the benefit of both the University and the public at large. The repository will also be used to archive University records and other assets in accordance with the practices of the University Archives.

This session will focus on the features and services associated with the Scholars' Repository, including a discussion of authors’ rights and the Open Access movement. Learn how you can participate in and help guide this important initiative.

In this session, you’ll work with other faculty in small groups to explore what you’ve learned at FITSI and share your plans for your targeted courses. Consider whether observations made by your colleagues can be adapted to your own discipline. Share your thoughts on how you see technology enhancing teaching and learning in your target course. At the end of the working session, you’ll report out to the other groups on the specific impacts you hope FITSI will have on your teaching and on your students’ learning. You will have the opportunity to demonstrate any materials or applied technology you like.