Tech-Tuesdays, 6-3-08

Folks,

Greetings from the Brigham City regional campus! This is Tech-Tuesdays message is intended for members of the USU Brigham City faculty. Hopefully you’ll find the information useful in your teaching efforts. If you feel you’ve received this message in error, kindly hit “delete” and have a fabulous day!

Tech-Tuesdays screen-casts now on RCDE Wiki!

Recently I’ve been going back and updating some rather dated video screen-casts from prior “Tech-Tuesdays” USUBC faculty training segments. I’ve also added a couple of new ones dealing with Podcasting practices and issues (more will be added to this series as we move along). Look for these screen-casts (and lots of other cool stuff) on the new RCDEA Wiki site, created back in March by the intrepid USUBC Biology professor and tech wizard, Kevin Young. Kudos to Kevin for creating this Wiki! I think it will prove to be an excellent tool for training, networking, collaborating, and generally enhancing the quality of teaching and learning for Brigham City faculty and the larger RCDE community. Here’s the Web address: http://rcdea.wetpaint.com.

Using PowerPoint in Interactive Broadcast Classes

Many instructors are finding it useful to manipulate the contents of PowerPoint slides “on the fly” during their interactive broadcast classes, such as completing bullet items, filling in blanks, etc. This is a great learning activity, but keep in mind that the resolution of the video displayed at the remote classrooms is somewhat diminished compared to what the students in the local classroom can see. To overcome this, you can “toggle” back and forth between edit mode and slide show mode by using the “ALT-Tab” key combination – here’s how: First, open the PowerPoint file, then select “Slide Show” to launch the slide show. Now you can toggle back to “Edit” mode by holding down the ALT key and pressing the Tab key. After you’ve navigated to the appropriate slide and made the desired changes, you can “ALT-Tab” back into slide show mode to show the slide at full-screen.

Tech Gadgets in Education

What if every student in your class had an iPhone? Check out the article below…some interesting ideas for employing technology in the classroom!

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Departments/AdultLearning/?article=EducationUpgrade&GT1=27001

Weekly Web Sighting: Instructional Architect

Here’s a great article on Instructional Architect that ran in the 2008 annual edition of Research Matters, the annual publication of the office of the vice president for research. The article is at the link below, with a link to the Instructional Architect web site immediately following:

http://research.usu.edu/researchmatters/htm/designing-the-digital-classroom

http://ia.usu.edu

OK – that’s going to wrap it for this Tech-Tuesdays message. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if there are topics relating to technology in teaching or other concerns that you’d like to me to address. Thanks!