Teaching with Technology
Past Brown Bag Workshops
April 9, 2008 - Information Overload- Lisa Spiro
Recently business research firm Basex named information overload the “problem of the year” and estimated that it costs $650 billion annually. According to a 2005 UK study, information overload can lower IQ by as much as 10 points. Feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of information? Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center, will provide practical tips for dealing with information overload as part of the Teaching with Technology brown bag series, which is sponsored by Fondren Library’s Digital Media Center and Information Technology’s Educational Technologies group. She will discuss methods such as the “Getting Things Done” approach as well as computer-based tools for finding information, managing projects and to-do lists, organizing research, and more.Free box lunches will be provided for the first 15 people who register at http://library.rice.edu/news-events-folder/infooverloadbb/view
April 30, 2008 - Teaching with Technology Showcase - guest presenters from Rice Faculty
Rice faculty share their experiences in using technology in for instructional purposes. Come hear how Rice instructors are using clickers, games, social networks, blogs, and more in their classrooms.. Free box lunches will be provided for the first 15 people who register by emailing lspiro@rice.edu.
March 12, 2008 - Second Life in Teaching and Learning
Back by popular request, Phil Montgomery discusses Second Life applications in teaching and learning. This presentation will explore how Second Life, a virtual networked 3-D environment, can be used to explore new ways of teaching and research. Second Life provides a ready-built laboratory for investigating the semantic web, which is a step beyond the Web 2.0 resources, such as Facebook and YouTube. Free box lunches will be provided for the first 15 people who register by emailing lspiro@rice.edu.
February 20, 2008 - Social Software and Education - Lisa Spiro, Carlos Solis
Join Educational Technologies and the Digital Media Center staff for a presentation on Social Networking web sites, social bookmarking, and the power of tagging in sharing images and academic references.
January 23, 2008 - It's Your Turn! - Carlos Solis, Lisa Spiro, Angela Rabuck and Terry Graham
Educational Technologies and the Digital Media Center invite faculty members to join them in conversation to discuss technology based teaching projects, interests, question and directions.
Special Session: January 17, 2008 OWL-Space Best Practices - Angela Rabuck
A look at how to get the most out of your OWL-Space for course management and collaborations. Find out what students want to see in OWL-Space course sites; collect tips and tricks, share what is working for you. Free lunch to the first 10 RSVPs to edtech@rice.edu.
December 12, 2007— Audience Response Systems, plus Video Conferencing at Rice: from the Desktop to the Classroom - Carlos Solis and Terry Graham
Come try out the classroom clickers that you've been hearing about! We've requested a demo of TurningPoint audience response system, the tool that integrates with Microsoft® PowerPoint® and allows students to participate in presentations or lectures. In addition to audience response systems, we will be discussing video conferencing, the facilities and options currently available to the Rice community, and some of the classes and projects that have taken advantage of video conferencing in the last year.
November 14, 2007— Second life in Teaching and Learning, Phillip Montgomery
Second Life in Teaching and Learning: This presentation will explore how Second Life, a virtual networked 3-D environment, can be used to explore new ways of teaching and research. Second Life provides a ready-built laboratory for investigating the semantic web, which is a step beyond the Web 2.0 resources, such as Facebook and YouTube.
October 24, 2007 — I Didn't Know You Could Do That: 5 Tips and Tools, Lisa Spiro and Carlos Solis
Using current technologies in today's university courses sounds more difficult than it is. Many instructors' daily tasks already touch on technologies that can be converted to teaching enhancements, or are similar to educational technologies in use at other universities. Come learn how your familiar routines can lead you to including helpful technologies in your classroom. Some of the tools we'll cover include: Google Docs, RSS feeds, Zotero, and the MATRIX media manager.
September 19, 2007 — PowerPoint: Presenting Your Data, Linda Driskill and Mary Purugganan
Powerpoint can be a powerful tool for instructors and students. Learn how to guide your students to present and format data in ways that will pique the interest of their audience without sacrificing the integrity of their research.
August 23, 2007 — OWL-Space: New Year - New Tools, Angela Rabuck
New features have been added to the online course management and collaboration tool. Come find out how to add additional resources to your course syllabi, discussions, and grade books!
April 10, 2007 — "Responding to Student PowerPoint Presentations": Mary Purugganan, Cain Project
The best PowerPoint files make a student’s total presentation:
- Easy to comprehend
- Accessible
- Usable and
- Personally and culturally engaging for the intended audience.
Faculty can help students achieve these goals and avoid common faults, such as:
- Overloading slides with text
- Poor legibility
- Incomplete messages, and
- Distracting composition.
This workshop covered how to:
- Introduce PowerPoint assignments so that students understand how visuals can reinforce both content and delivery
- Frame preliminary feedback to encourage students to revise and rethink their design decisions, and
- Evaluate final PPT slides efficiently with rubrics and summary feedback.
March 21, 2007 — Using GIS Tools in Education
Learn the latest and coolest mapping technologies from Rice's own GIS/Data Center. In this workshop by Eva Garza and German Diaz, you will learn about Geographic Information Systems and how it is used in many disciplines throughout campus. The GIS/Data Center at Fondren helps Rice researchers and students map everything from history events, people and businesses to languages and trees. This workshop will have interactive demos and showcase interesting regional and international projects.
February 21, 2007 — Web 2.0 Tools for Education
"Web 2.0" has become the buzzword of the moment, referring to web-based services such as social bookmarking and networking sites, wikis, blogs, and other tools that facilitate collaboration, interaction and manipulating information. Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center, will explore the potential of Web 2.0 for education, discussing tools that support activities such as:
- Conducting and managing research: e.g. Zotero, Connotea
- Collecting and sharing information: e.g. del.icio.us, H20 Playlist, LibraryThing, blogger
- Collaborative writing & project management: e.g. Google Documents and Spreadsheets, BaseCamp
- Visualizing and analyzing information through mashups : e.g. PlanetHazard, EpiSider, The American Image
January 24, 2007 —Teaching with Digital Images Using the OWL-Space Instructional Media Management System
OWL-Space’s Collaboration and Course Management features an Instructional Media Management (IMM) module that enables an online, hosted environment for constructing presentations using digital collections.
The IMM system is an intuitive software that allows for federated searching of university-owned digital images. Desired assets are organized into slide shows that can be downloaded and presented in the classroom and later viewed online and printed by students.
The Department of Art History’s Visual Resources Center (VRC) is the largest IMM collection with already 16,000+ curriculum-driven digital images. Using the VRC’s digital collection, this workshop will demonstrate how to:
- search the IMM
- build slide shows
- add personal images to a slide show
- present them both online via the Web and offline through a downloadable freeware client
- enable them for student review
- archive them for future use
- use IMM digital assets in third-party software such as Powerpoint
November 15, 2006 — Podcasting
Want to learn an easy way to provide online access to audio of your classroom lectures, research updates, or musings? Try podcasting. Through podcasting, you can publish audio files to the Internet and make it simple for listeners to receive regular downloads of new content. This workshop will examine some of the ways that podcasting is being used in education and will provide an overview of producing your own podcast.
Given by: Lisa Spiro and Jane Zhao
October 18, 2006 — OWL-Space: Instructional Media Management
Media management is a useful feature of OWL-Space. It provides Rice faculty with a place to store, share, and access image collections for classroom usage. Users will be introduced to the system, shown how to manage collections, and learn how to create presentations.
September 20, 2006 — OWL-Space: Online collaborations and online group activities:
In addition to online course syllabi, discussions and grade books, OWL-Space collaboration sites are available upon request. OWL-Space offers tools such as a shared resource repository, central calendar and communication tools for your research and collaboration needs. Presented by Angela Rabuck.
August 24, 2006 — OWL-Space: Course Management Software @ Rice:
This workshop is a demonstration and discussion of the OWL-Space concept. It will provide an overview of the tools available for online course management at Rice.
April 17, 2006 — Gaming in Education:
When people play SimCity, are they learning about urban planning? When they spend hours playing Civilization 3, are they developing skills in politics and diplomacy? What is the potential of games for education? In this panel discussion, three members of the Gaming at Rice group will investigate this question and highlight their own work in gaming and education:
Tony Elam, Associate Dean of Engineering, is an avid game collector, player and expert as well as the convener of the Gaming at Rice group, which is exploring the viability and applicability of gaming to education and research at Rice.
Leslie Miller, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning, is studying the use of multimedia to improve learning among adolescents and is the Principal Investigator on several educational gaming projects.
Chris Pound, Developer/Systems Administrator for Enterprise Applications, studies the anthropology of gaming and is teaching a course on social aspects of gaming at SMU's Guildhall.
April 5, 2006 — OWL-Space Introduction:
In the Fall of 2006, the Educational Technologies group from the IT department at Rice will be launching the Course Management section of OWL-Space. During this talk, Carlos Solis, Ed. Tech. Manager, and Angela Rabuck, Ed.Tech. Instructional Technology Specialist, will showcase this service, which includes tools such as: online syllabus, resource and drop box section, announcement delivery, and class e-mail distribution and archiving systems. Faculty who are interested in Course Management tools and those who have WebCT accounts are encouraged to attend this presentation.
March 8, 2006 — Media Management and Online Video Resources at Rice:
Carlos Solis, manager of the Educational Technologies group from the IT department at Rice, will discuss media capture and delivery facilities available at Rice. In this talk, he will present video course resources created by Rice faculty and showcase the next service to be deployed in the OWL-Space framework, the Instructional Media Management system. IMMS is a service that will allow faculty to integrate digital image catalogs into online instructional resources and classroom use.
February 8, 2006 — Emerging Technologies and Education:
Cyprien Lomas will join us via video conference to discuss new and emerging technologies in education from the University Perspective. Dr. Lomas is the Director of the Learning Centre in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC. He is also the first Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) Scholar in Residence. Past appointments include being one of the two NLII Fellows in 2004 and working with the Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE) community since 2004.
Recent projects include serving on the organizing committee for the Northern Voices one-day blogging conference held in Vancouver on February 19, 2005, organizing and executing the Experience It! track at the NLII Annual Meeting, and putting on the NLII Spring Focus session on Emerging Practices and Learning Technologies held at Rice University on March 9-10, 2005. He blogs at 42/1 and for Educause.
Dr. Lomas co-facilitates the Horizon Project Virtual Community of Practice on New and Emerging Learning Technologies and is presenting a series of workshops on Learning Space Design. Recently he and Ulrich Rauch presented "Does Technology Help or Hinder Learning?" at the Science Supper Series. They also presented, along with Bryan Alexander, a session entitled "Friendster trumps WebCT:" at the NMC online conference on social software. Past projects include using guided inquiry and simulations to prepare students for Chemistry Labs, creating Biology Image Learning Objects, and implementing writing, reflection and e-Portfolios in a first year Biology course.
December 14, 2005 — Online Course Management and Collaboration:
The division of Information Technology (IT) has been developing a conceptual framework for online tools to be used in teaching and learning, and in research. This framework will be called OWL-Space. In this session, Carlos Solis and Angela Rabuck will discuss the Course Management and Collaboration component of OWL-Space. This tool, powered by the open source system called Sakai, will be deployed university-wide in the fall of 2006, but faculty can obtain accounts as early as Spring 2006. Come get acquainted with OWL-Space.
November 9, 2005 — Teaching with Sound:
This presentation by Carlos Solis will walk you through a series of examples on how to get, use, produce and distribute sound related files and suggest some instructional applications. We will also spend some time with podcasting and point at resources under development at Rice.
October 12, 2005 — Improving Class Communications with Wikis & Blogs:
Dr. Chris Pound, Enterprise Applications Developer and Systems Administrator, will explain exactly what a wiki is and how it can encourage collaborative learning. Chris is a cultural anthropologist with a number of academic publications on social aspects of information technology. He is also the current administrator of blogs.rice.edu, and he worked previously in IT as an instructional technologist. This session to be held in 3092 Duncan Hall.
September 14, 2005 — Teaching with Digital Images:
Images can make learning more concrete and engaging. This workshop will feature ERC Director, Dr. Lisa Spiro, and Mark Pompelia, Visual Resources Curator. Together, they will demonstrate how to find, scan, manipulate, and employ digital images in lectures and learning activities.
August 18, 2005 — Educating the Net Generation:
Dr. Tony Gorry, Friedkin Chair of Management at the Jones School and Director of CTTL, is currently researching the impact of information technology on organizations and society. He will address the current generation of tech-savvy students and will give insight into the skills, interests, and learning styles they bring to the classroom. For preparation or further research, check out the book of the same name, available at http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen
