March Session

Join us on Wednesday March 17th at 12:30 pm for "Ere Their Story Die"--a session on e-portfolios. A portfolio has been described as a "collection of a student's work specifically selected to tell a particular story." Do your students have the technological tools to create portfolios for the 21st century? Discover what some of your colleagues are doing to meet this challenge.

As always be prepared to identify the source for our session's title (think poet) to win a door prize.

View the session in Tegrity

February's Session: Always Sombody Else's Horizon

This month's topic was the Horizon Report, the annual international guide to technology trends likely to have a large impact on teaching and learning.Mobile computing and the open content movement made the cut for technologies likely to be important to educators in one year or less. In two to three years the report indicated that electronic books and simple augmented reality technologies will be adopted. In four to five years, it predicted that gesture-based computing and visual data analysis will be widely in use.

Get the full report.

If you missed the session, see it on Tegrity here

Upcoming Sessions

February 10 "Always Somebody Else's Horizon"
The Horizon Report, the annual guide to technology trends, comes out in January. Find out what's ahead in one year, in two to three years, and in four to five. What are the critical challenges? How will we respond?

March 17 E-Portfolios--"Ere their Story Die"
A portfolio has been described as a "collection of a student's work specifically selected to tell a particular story." Do your students have the technological tools to create portfolios for the 21st century? Discover what some of your colleagues are doing to meet this challenge.

April 21 The Adventure of the Five Tees
Find out what famed educator Rebecca Hopkins is up to with the 5T grant. What can the rest of us learn from her experiences using technology in the classroom?

January Session: "Oh the Mind, Mind has Mountains"

The January session featured demonstrations of mind mapping software. According to Wikipedia, "mind maps are diagrams used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to or arranged around a central key word or idea." Joe Dulak, Academic Skills Center Director, talked about how he is using Cmap Tools to work with his students. This free program "empowers users to construct, navigate, share, and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. " You can download the program here.

Dr. Tricia Klosky, Associate Professor of Social Science and Coordinator of Criminal Justice, very successfully uses FreeMind with her students to help them map the process and progress of their research. She has seen remarkable improvements in student performance since introducing this tool.

Some other mind mapping tools include: Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus, Google's Mind Map, and EBSCO's Visual Search (you can choose this in any of the EBSCO databases).

Watch a YouTube video with Tony Buzan, a leading figure in the mind mapping field, for more background.

This month's door prize was awarded to Dr. Patrick Barlow, Director of College Assessment, for correctly identifying the source of this session's title as coming from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Missed the session? View it now on Tegrity

January's Program: "Oh the Mind, Mind Has Mountains"

Mark your calendar for the next Chat Chow session. Wednesday, January 20th at 12:30 famed educators, Joe Dulak and Tricia Klosky, will be on hand to demonstrate how they are using mind mapping techniques. Remember there is a prize for the first person who correctly identifies the allusion in this month's title (hint--think poet).

What's the Use a Book without Picures or Conversations?

The November session focus was on e-books and online reading devices. As publishers scramble to keep people reading/buying books, bringing all sorts of new devices and formats to the market place, alternatives to the traditional book are catching on in a big way. Carol Daul-Elhindi demonstrated the newest item on library book shelves--the PlayAway, an audio book the user can listen to without needing a CD player or a computer. Marty Judd described his experiences with Kindle, Amazon's wildly popular e-reader, and Sarah Bearbower treated the group to a memorable reading of a Stephen King novel on her iPod. The bookstore's Donna White was up next with a discussion of e-text books. As students struggle to pay for conventional textbooks, universities across the country are experimenting with delivery methods for cheaper online textbooks. Barnes and Noble is marketing their reader--the Nook, which Donna will stock in the bookstore. Some university bookstores are working with publishers to provide PODs, print on demand machines that enable students to print out copies of an online textbooks at substantial savings.

Missed the session? View it now on Tegrity

As these new reading technologies proliferate many question arise. Will they actually enhance learning or or will they instead discourage the deep reading skills necessary for academic success? What does the research tell us? Will these devices work for scholars who like to annotate, underline, and generally personalize their reading materials? What will the new business model for distribution of e-textbooks look like? Will faculty and students have more choices or fewer? Use the articles listed below to begin an engagement with the issues:

6 Lessons One Campus Learned about e-textbooks. Jeffrey Young (Chronicle of Higher Education 6/12/09 vol. 55 issue 39, EBSCO Professional Collection)

Amazon's Kindle is Off to College. Douglas MacMillan (Business Week Online 5/5/09 EBSCO Academic Search Premier)

Kindle for the Academic. Alex Golub (Inside Higher Education Nov 3, 2009)

Reading Behavior in the Digital Environment. Ziming Liu (Journal of Documentation. 2005 vol. 61 issue 6, ProQuest)

Rethinking Online Reading Assessment. Julie Coiro ( Educational Leadership March 2009, EBSCO Professional Collection)

Usability Evaluation of e-books. doi:10.1016/j.displa.2008.12.002

Yen Yu Kang (Displays April 2009 vol. 30 issue 2 Science Direct)

"Don't Waste Time Mourning--Organize"

The October session of Chat Chow & Web 2.0 focused on Web 2.0 technologies for organizing information flows. Carol Daul-Elhindi demonstrated an easy way to set up RSS feeds from library databases directly into SMU e-mail accounts. Chad Kjorlien showed the group how he uses Google Reader to organize the numerous news feeds he subscribes to into a manageable whole. Delving further into Google, Sarah Bearbower took us to her iGoogle page, demonstrating how to set up a portal using modules that can be linked to the RSS feeds, the blogs and wikis, and anything else that an individual might want to organize on a portal page. Finally Ruth Torstenson Lemasters described how to use Yahoo Pipes to consolidate and filter streams of information using a graphical interface.

Dr. William Crozier was the recipient of the C. C. W. 2.0 door prize after correctly identifying the quote from this session's title,"don't waste time mourning, organize," as a line in a speech given by early union organizer, Joe Hill, as he was about to be executed.

Missed the session? No problem. View it here on Tegrity.