FITS Newsletter Home

Contributed by Lynda S. LaRoche, Assistant Director of Instructional & Learning Services (I.L.S.) and Moodle Support Coordinator

One of our greatest resources in academia is the accumulative knowledge and expertise of our colleagues. Whether listening to a presentation, participating in a discussion group, sharing information one-on-one, mentoring a colleague, or numerous other ways, I seem to learn something new every day.

Finding opportunities to participate with fellow educators is becoming more challenging as economic factors play a larger role in professional development. Thus, as I aspire to continue along my self-paced path of life-long learning, I actively seek opportunities that leverage the expertise and knowledge of all participants.

Two such opportunities are swiftly approaching: The 11^th Annual Faculty Instructional Technology Support (FITS) Summer Workshop and the 3^rd K-12 Bridge Program Symposium on Technology in Teaching and Information Literacy. Each of these events is hosted by Instructional & Learning Services (I.L.S.) here at DePauw and will offer a variety of opportunities to enhance your professional development.

The 11^th Annual FITS Summer Workshop takes place May 26^th through May 29^th and June 1^st. Whether you want to refine or extend what you are already doing in your teaching or you wish move in a new direction, this workshop will provide you with focused time and resources that enable you to link methods to course goals. These methods may include enhancing your class materials with visuals, developing audio resources for your students, learning to use collaborative technologies, designing a new approach for teaching a difficult concept, or lightening your own load by using electronic grading or question banks. To submit a proposal or to learn more about the workshop, please browse to the 11th Annual FITS Summer Workshop Web site (http://www.depauw.edu/univ/fits/sum09/index.asp).

The 3^rd K-12 Bridge Program Symposium on Technology in Teaching and Information Literacy takes place on June 1^st in partnership with the last day of the FITS Summer Workshop. This one-day symposium will focus on using technology to enrich teaching and learning so students graduate to the workplace or continued studies with a strong foundation in information literacy. Additionally, the symposium is designed to strengthen Indiana education, promote opportunity through educational collaborations between K-12 and higher education, develop long-term relationships across disciplines and school districts, and to share expertise and experience amongst colleagues within Putnam County. To learn more about the symposium as well as other efforts of this program, please browse to DePauw University’s K-12 Bridge Program Web site (http://www.depauw.edu/it/k12/).

The most rewarding choice I have made in my career has been to become a part of the DePauw community. The overall willingness to share experiences as well as the richness of knowledge found on our campus enables me to learn new things every day and also offers me the opportunity to share with others my own abilities and skills. I encourage you to leverage the accumulative knowledge and expertise of your colleagues by actively participating in the opportunities offered to all of us. After all, we are one of our greatest resources.

Contributed by Lynda LaRoche, FITS Specialist & Moodle Support Coordinator

FITS is accepting proposals for the 10th annual summer workshop to be held May 27-30 and June 2, 2008.

As in the past, the workshop offers a series of plenary sessions, discussion groups, and mini-courses. Participants will have plenty of time to work on projects and receive one-on-one help from instructional technologists. In addition, facilities will be available for practice and for discussion groups. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a good start on a sustainable course or research project.

This is an opportune time for you to:

• Prepare a Moodle course site
• Integrate GIS into your curriculum
• Learn about digital assessment of assignments
• Leverage the Web (such as RSS, YouTube, micro-blogging, Facebook, etc.)
• Use visual objects (not only displaying them, but also using them to enhance your course goals)
• Plus, many other project possibilities

To register online, please browse to http://moodle.depauw.edu/mod/feedback/view.php?id=16253username=guest and complete the application by Tuesday April 22 (Note: Due to faculty requests this has been extended from the original April 18th deadline.) Sample proposals can be found online at http://www.depauw.edu/univ/fits/workshop/.

If you would like to consult with a FITS staff member prior to submitting a proposal, please feel free to contact us (Tom Dickinson, Michael Gough, Lynda LaRoche, Veronica Pejril, Carol Smith, and Beth Wilkerson).

Contributed by Lynda LaRoche, FITS Specialist & Moodle Support Coordinator

This year’s FITS Spring Workshop will be on Saturday, March 15th from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the Julian Center.

The workshop will focus on Moodle and provide opportunities for both faculty members just starting to use Moodle as well as those wishing to enhance their current Moodle expertise. Breakout sessions will focus on topics such as the Moodle gradebook, steps in Moodle page design, an introduction to Moodle, copyright issues, and more. Also, there will be hands-on sessions where participants can work on their individual course with the aid of instructional technologists. By the end of the workshop, participants should feel comfortable enough with Moodle to build course sites.

To register for the 2008 FITS Spring Workshop on March 15th, please complete the short survey at http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB227HQ7YZKGC by March 11, 2008. Your feedback on this survey will help us identify on which features to focus during breakout sessions.

Also, we regret that this workshop is scheduled on the same date as the Women in Science Reunion. If you are involved with Women in Science, we encourage you to attend the reunion and we will be happy to find another time to help you with Moodle. Additional Moodle opportunities are listed at http://www.depauw.edu/univ/fits/events/events.asp#oncampus. You are also welcome to email us at  moodle at depauw.edu to request a department visit or a one-on-one session.

We hope to see you there!

Contributed by Michael Gough, Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START, and Dave Berque, Tenzer Family University Professor in Instructional Technology, Professor of Computer Science

Seventeen faculty members participated in the FITS fall workshop on November 17, which consisted of a condensed day-long look at two different technologies gaining use at DePauw, Moodle and Tablet PCs.

Using Moodle

To start the workshop, the 11 faculty members shared their goals for using Moodle in their teaching. Their ideas ranged across a variety of applications using Moodle, such as distributing course materials and library reserves, engaging their students in online discussion outside the classroom, or exchanging students’ papers electronically rather than in printed versions. They then spent the rest of the day in a variety of mini-sessions focused toward those goals.

A sample highlight from the workshop was a hands-on activity focused on how to set up Moodle to enable students to submit completed assignments online The faculty members were able to experience what Moodle is like from both the student and instructor perspectives. They first worked as a student and submitted mock assignments and received feedback on those assignments. Then, during the second half of the activity, they received assignments as an instructor from mock students and sent their feedback to the students.

At the end of the day, many participants were well on their way toward building their own Moodle courses and FITS instructional technologists will follow up with those faculty members throughout the coming weeks help them finish their courses.

FITS will also have a Moodle track during the Winter Term workshop. For more information on the Winter Term workshop see the next article.

Exploring Tablet PCs

The six faculty members who participated in the Tablet PC track had a full day of activities. Each participant was given a Tablet PC to use during the workshop. After learning how to use the Tablet’s digital pen to add ink to documents, participants heard from three colleagues who regularly use Tablet PCs to support their teaching. Participants also had hands-on experience with a variety of Tablet PC software applications and were able to practice annotating Word documents, Power Point presentations, and PDF files with digital ink. Each participant also took a “Tablet PC Deep Dive” which consisted of spending some time grading a student assignment, preparing an actual PowerPoint or DyKnow presentation, or annotating a research article.

The 2008 FITS Winter term workshop is highly flexible and individualized. We encourage faculty members to submit a proposal of what technology-centered curricular goals you would like to accomplish. Plenary sessions on emergent technologies are augmented with individualized guidance, based on faculty members’ needs. Below are some ways these technologies can be used to support your curricular goals.

Pedagogical uses for Social Computing:

a. Wikis
b. Blogs
c. Social Bookmarking
d. RSS feeds

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for:

a. Augmenting student research with GIS data
b. Mapping your own data
c. Creating interactive “what-if” scenarios
d. other

Audio recording and editing for:

a. studio music production
b. podcasting
c. web-based audio clips
d. other

Moodle

The Moodle track is designed to meet the demand of faculty members who wish to begin building their courses with Moodle while upholding the flexibility and project-oriented format of the FITS Winter Term Workshop. Faculty members are still encouraged to submit a proposal or a list of goals that they would like to accomplish for their course. Participants can choose from a variety of Moodle-related workshops to meet their needs. Anticipated topics for the sessions are listed below; however, our itinerary will be largely demand-driven. Participants need not attend every session. In addition to these sessions, a FITS instructional technologist can meet with you to discuss your specific course goals, or to explore a topic that may not be covered in our sessions. Participants may wish to combine the Moodle track with some of the other Winter Term Workshop opportunities as necessary to meet their goals. If you are interested in doing this, be sure to include how you would like to combine such technologies in your proposal.

Moodle Session Topics

Introduction to Moodle, goals and expectations
File Management and Course Organization
Assignments, File Submission, and the Gradebook
Moodle’s Discussion Forums
Moodle and Media
Using Moodle’s Wikis
Converting a Blackboard course to a Moodle Course
Importing previous course materials into a new course
Using Moodle’s Group feature

To participate, we ask that you submit a short proposal no later than December 15th to Veronica Pejril at veronicapejril@depauw.edu, outlining your goals for the Winter Term Workshop. If you have any questions regarding the workshop, or migrating your content to Moodle for Spring 2008, please contact myself, or Michael Gough at michaelgough@depauw.edu.

Contributed by Michael Gough and Dave Berque

This year’s FITS fall workshop will be on Saturday, November 17^th from 8:30 to 2:00 in the Julian lab spaces on the first floor of Julian. We will have two different tracks, Tablet PCs and Moodle, running simultaneously. A continental breakfast and lunch will be provided. See descriptions of each track below. We ask that you sign up for only one track. To register, click on one of the links at the bottom of the article.

Tablet PC Track:

Participants will explore the ways Tablet PCs (essentially laptops with pens) can be used to support teaching and learning. Specific applications will include (a) using a digital pen to annotate student work and other material using Word, (b) using a digital pen together with standard tools such as PowerPoint to make classroom presentations more spontaneous, (c) using DyKnow classroom collaboration and notetaking software to engage students, and (d) using LectureScribe to make electronic answer keys. We will devote a significant amount of time to discussing the pedagogical implications of using pen-based computing. In addition, participants will be encouraged to bring electronic versions of papers that they need to grade (there will be time to get some grading done during the workshop) and/or electronic copies of professional reading they need to do, and/or classroom material they need to prepare. More details will be provided to workshop registrants.

Moodle Track

Faculty members will learn how different Moodle features could best meet their course needs while gaining hands on experience creating their course(s). Breakout sessions on popular topics will focus on the pedagogical uses of Moodle’s features and give a brief technical overview on how to use them. Participants should come with a goal for how they would like their course set up. Lots of time will be devoted toward individual course building and one-on-one support. By the end of the workshop, participants should feel comfortable enough with Moodle to meet the needs of their course goal. To register, click on the link below to take our short pre-registration survey. This will help us identify what features to focus on.

Register for the Tablet PC track

Register for the Moodle track