It's "Geek" to Me

The April 6th session featured the return of Dr. David Jackson from the Education Department and Joe Dulak, Department Chair of Academic Skills. Jackson described how he uses Wikispaces, a collaborative web-based tool. Not only does this tool function as an effective work space for his students, but he is also able to use it to organize the assessment work done by his department. Wikispaces is in the cloud so it is always available where ever you are working and have access to the web. It is free when you set up an educator version and you can invite others to use the space, enabling various status levels from observer to organizer.

Joe Dulak has been looking at e-books and, in particular, how they may or may not benefit the disabled students he works with. He talked about Cafescribe, a website where you can browse new books and purchase text books and MyScribe, a software program for reading and annotating the e-texts. A good discussion ensued about the ways in which the e-textbook technology is developing.

Jason Spartz, Director of Instructional Technology, finished up the session with an introduction to the McGraw Hill partnership with Blackboard, McGraw Hill Connect. In this new agreement faculty will be able to look for textbooks and assign them to students, all from within Blackboard. Students in turn may then purchase the materials, again all within Blackboard.


If you missed the session you can view it here in Tegrity