The Director of Northern Arizona University's e-Learning Center welcomes attendees to the fifth annual Institute and introduces this year's themes:

• Doing More with Less
• Social and Group Work
• Communication Tools
• Podcasting and Video in Courses

Twitter Hash Tag: #SILT09

What is podcasting, why would you want to use podcasts in courses, and which kinds of podcasts are best suited for which purposes? We'll discuss how the type of content, its intended use, and your target audience shape how you should create your podcasts. We'll also introduce NAU on iTunes U as a way for making podcasts available to your students.

An overview of Web 2.0 tools that have potential for creative use in higher education. Engage your students with these simple-to-learn but powerful tools.

Google Docs

A collaborative online office suite that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation tool. Compatible with MS Office file formats, free, and lets multiple people work on a document at the same time!

Skype

A text, voice, and video conferencing tool that lets you contact other computers for free or dial regular telephones for a tiny fee.

Twitter

Lets you post short messages describing what you're doing in 140 or fewer text characters. Great for posting class announcements.

Google Earth

Zoom around the world or under the ocean! Using layers, look at geological features, historical sites, or just find your house. 

Flickr

Organize and share your photos, communicate with friends, and browse for cool pictures.

Facebook

The most popular social network for college students is now available to everyone. Get back in touch with distant friends and family, share photos, chat, play games, send messages, join special interest groups.

Delicious

A place to save your web bookmarks online so you can get to them from anywhere and can share them with colleagues, students, friends, and family. See the bookmarks of others who share your interests.

Pandora

If you like the Beatles, you will like... A free streaming music service that plays songs you like. You rate the songs as you listen, and Pandora suggests similar music that you might also like. Great for finding new music.

Poll Everywhere

An easy way to create one-question online polls. People respond online or by texting from their mobile phones. The responses are updated in real time, showing results instantly.

And many more...

This session introduces participants to two handy tools for use with student assignments:

• Annotate, a grade-marking tool, allows for easy markup using code sets of commonly-used corrections
• SafeAssign, an anti-plagiarism tool, generates originality reports on students' papers

We will also discuss ways to educate students about academic dishonesty, proper citation, and informative (proactive) versus punitive (reactive) measures.

Google Docs is a collaborative online office suite that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation tool. But instead of installing software on your computer, you work on Google Docs in your web browser. You can share your documents with one or more collaborators, and multiple people can edit simultaneously. You see your collaborators' changes appear alongside yours in real time, and Google Docs keeps track of which person made which changes!

In this workshop you will learn to create a Gmail account, build a Google word processing document, build a Google spreadsheet, add a collaborator, explore the formatting tools, and export Google Docs in MS Word and MS Excel formats.

Twitter lets you post short messages, called tweets, of 140 or fewer text characters, and anyone who has a Twitter account can read your messages. You can tweet from your computer or your cell phone, and people can receive your tweets the same way. You can also send your tweets to Facebook or your regular website. A number of educators are using Twitter to facilitate communication with their students, particularly for announcements or discussions. See examples of instructional uses of Twitter, and learn how to set up your own account.

Have you finally scanned all your research slides and copied your digital photos to your computer? Would you like an easy way to share these images with your students and colleagues? Google Picasa is free software that makes it easy to organize and share your photos, and it also helps you create movies, slide shows, collages, and more. This workshop demonstrates techniques for organizing, editing, managing, and sharing your photos using Picasa.

Chances are that you've marked favorite pages in your web browser and then used those bookmarks to quickly return to the pages. But if you work on more than one computer or use more than one browser, you've probably been frustrated by "missing" bookmarks. Wouldn't it be nice if you could have all your bookmarks in one easily accessible place, and better yet, if you could tag your bookmarks with keywords so you can organize them and search for them later? Social bookmarking tools like Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Bb Scholar do just that. These online tools are available from any computer or any browser, and they let you share your bookmark collections with students and colleagues. By comparing your tags with those of others who have similar interests, you can be introduced to new useful sites. And Scholar even works within Bb Vista!

Skype is a multi-purpose communications tool for the web. It combines text-based instant messaging, optional voice and video communication, and direct file transfer. But what's best about Skype is that you can use it to make calls to regular telephones and cell phones. Skype is available for Mac and Windows, and it also works on some other wi-fi enabled devices such as the iPod touch. Making calls from computer to computer is free, and calls from a computer to a regular phone are typically much cheaper than long distance phone calls. You can even do conference calls!

In online activities some students feel less connected with their instructors and their peers. By adding voice to your course, in the form of audio recordings, you can create a more personal environment that helps students feel involved in a community of learning. This session looks at different techniques and tools, including Wimba Voice, that can help you include audio recordings in your course.

This session is all about hardware: Multi-Touch iPods, Netbooks, XOs (One Laptop Per Child), Kindles, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), Tablet PCs, and Smartphones. Which will be the next big thing in education? This is a hands-on session that explains what these gadgets are and what you can do with them, instructionally speaking. We'll pass them around, letting you try these new technologies, and we'll answer your questions as best we can.

Many people are familiar with podcasts but have never considered making their own. This session demonstrates just how easy it can be to create and publish your own podcasts using free software and equipment that you probably already have access to. Participants will walk away with the knowledge necessary to create their own audio podcasts and upload them to iTunes U (iTunes link)!

Video can enliven in-person and online courses when used appropriately. This session focuses on considerations for using instructional video, such as copyright issues, accommodations for students who have disabilities, and technical requirements in different kinds of learning environments. We'll also discuss how to produce video content and will describe using three styles of presentation to reinforce concepts.

In these lean times, it's important to consider where you can save money. One way is to cut down on printing, duplication, and distribution costs. At NAU all faculty have access to a Blackboard Vista course shell, and using the shell to manage, distribute, and update documents can cut costs.  We will share some tips on how to use Vista to share your documents while also enhancing your instructional objectives.

We will reflect on assumptions about in-class teaching, questioning and refining those assumptions and suggesting ways to use Blackboard Vista and other technologies to help instructors use their class time more effectively while also keeping students engaged outside the classroom. We group our ideas into pre-class, during-class, and post-class activities, and we describe examples of monitored and mediated out-of-class assignments.

A panel of faculty who recently made the transition to teaching online or are in the process of doing so will discuss some of the issues, challenges, and lessons learned.

Some instructors object to using group activities and assignments in classes because they think groups take a lot of time to set up and manage. But group activities not only teach students valuable collaboration skills but also can enhance participants' learning. We'll define small groups and look at why you might want to use them. We'll also set the stage for using online groups effectively.

Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is software that helps students critique each other's work. They first calibrate their critiquing skills against those of the instructor. The software evaluates the students' ability to evaluate, and it compares their evaluations with those of other students. After using CPR in my BIO 320 class, I asked students whether the experience would lead them to do anything differently in their next write-ups of case studies. More than three quarters said "yes."

What kinds of pedagogical problems can new technologies help solve? This session discusses how to match instructional problems with the right technology solutions rather than simply adopting technology for its own sake. We describe examples such as hosting online office hours via Skype, having students act as eye-witness reporters on Twitter, encouraging student self-reflection by using blogs, and fostering collaboration through shared documents created with Google Docs.

Online discussions can be challenging and rewarding for students and instructors alike. This workshop offers techniques for effective facilitation of online discussions such as selecting an appropriate tone of voice, stating discussion expectations, writing a good discussion prompt, keeping a discussion going, and encouraging participation.

High-quality online discussions are born of high-quality assessment. You will learn about using rubrics to assess online discussions, examine online discussion rubrics used successfully by other faculty, and discuss how to implement rubrics in your own course to achieve your discussion goals.

In this hands-on workshop, you will create your own rubric for assessing online discussions in your course. Please bring to the workshop a list of the student learning outcomes for your course and a discussion assignment you'd like to use.

Join Virtual Session

The advent of Web 2.0 has spurred creative approaches to curricular design. Additionally, it has provided new ways to distribute programmatic content. Some examples of these new distribution mechanisms include RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, vodcasts, and podcasts. As a result, instructors are able to deliver content asynchronously directly to students, peers, and the public. This presentation focuses on curricular redesign, the “remixing” of content, and the integration of enhanced podcasts in an athletic training course.

A panel of faculty who are using podcasts in their courses will demonstrate their podcasts and discuss some of the issues, challenges, and lessons learned in producing them.

The Open Lab sessions are an opportunity for you to bring your specific questions about various software and technologies. Someone from the e-Learning Center staff will be available to discuss Bb Vista, Elluminate, Dreamweaver, iTunes U, online evaluations, podcast creation software, and more.  There is no specific agenda for these sessions, just show up with your questions!

The Open Lab sessions are an opportunity for you to bring your specific questions about various software and technologies. Someone from the e-Learning Center staff will be available to discuss Bb Vista, Elluminate, Dreamweaver, iTunes U, online evaluations, podcast creation software, and more.  There is no specific agenda for these sessions, just show up with your questions!