This week we hosted our third and final SPARK Community of Practice gathering of the semester. As was the case with previous events this one filled our conference room to capacity. We hope to continue these events in the spring semester, and would like your input on how we can improve upon them. To review,…
Do you Pecha Kucha?
Imagine if you had to teach your class in 6 minutes and 40 seconds, using 20 PowerPoint slides, each displayed for 20 seconds. Well, these are the rules for Pecha Kucha, “chatter” in Japanese, competitions being held worldwide. Even if you aren’t going to use this method in your class, going through the process of…
Next “Emerging Technology and Pie” Event: Screencasting
Our fourth and final “Emerging Technology and Pie” event of the semester will be Friday, November 16th from 1:20 to 2:20 p.m. “Emerging Technology and Pie” is an interest group for faculty and instructors who are interested in learning about the latest technologies being used for learning and teaching. The topic for the next event…
SPARK Community of Practice: Strategies for Using SPARK in Large Classes
Our third and final SPARK Community of Practice lunch of the semester will be Thursday, November 15th, 12:30-1:30 p.m. “SPARK Community of Practice” is an interest group for faculty and instructors who are interested in discussing the successes, challenges and best practices they have discovered while using SPARK as well as finding out about the…
Center for Teaching Event – Teaching with Clickers
Our friends at the Center for Teaching are organizing an event entitled: Teaching with Clickers: Using the Personal Response Systems (clickers) and PRS Software, on Tuesday November 13th. The Personal Response System (PRS) is a tool that is growing in popularity for instructors who teach large lecture classes. It is particularly popular because of the…
Video about “Today’s Student”
Cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch and 200 students at Kansas State University created a video about students in today’s college classrooms. It is an example of “digital storytelling” with an interesting mix of low tech (words on paper, chalkboard and walls) and high tech (time-lapse footage of a Google Doc being edited by the 200 students).…
Discounts on Adobe Software for Faculty
For a limited time, UMass Amherst faculty and staff can purchase Adobe software for personal use at a significant discount through the Adobe Select program. The program is usually only open to students and includes software such as Adobe Acrobat Professional and Adobe Creative Suite. Please excuse the sales-speak, but place your orders quickly! This offer…
Next “Emerging Technology and Pie” Event: Podcasting
Our third “Emerging Technology and Pie” event of the semester will be Thursday, November 1st from 1:00 to 2:15 p.m. “Emerging Technology and Pie” is an interest group for faculty and instructors who are interested in learning about the latest technologies being used for learning and teaching. The topic for the next event will be…
Mid-Semester = Mid-Terms and OpScan sheets
Well we’ve almost made it to the middle of the semester and for many people teaching large classes that means mid-term exams with bubble sheets being graded by the Optical Scan service at Whitmore. If you need to take grades from an OpScan data file and post them in SPARK make sure to check out…
A Different Kind of Presentation Tool
We’ve all seen (or at least heard of) a number of online communication and collaboration tools that have recently become popular: podcasting, wikis, blogs. . . . Some are good for distributing audio, while others lend themselves to displaying text or images. However, there seems to be a distinct lack of tools that can combine…
Academic Computing Fall Events Update!
The first “SPARK Community of Practice” and the first “Emerging Technology & Pie” each had over 20 attendees. It was great to see so many of you at these events and we hope to see more at these events in the future. Our next Emerging Technology Event will be looking at Online Tools for Collaboration…
Faculty Spotlight: Wikis for group projects
After attending an Emerging Technologies workshop Psychology professor Lisa Scott decided to have her students use a wiki for a class project. Professor Scott selected PBwiki, a free wiki service that we recommend as one of the more user-friendly wikis. Her students used PBWiki to build informational Web resources about the effects of different teratogens…