Page sections
- Overview
- What do you want to use technology for?
- What are some successful practices?
- Is there a repository of teaching materials?
- What technologies can I use?
- Want to teach in a room where you have support for the use of multimedia?
- Do you have questions about your classlists?
- What about distance education?
- Who is doing distance education?
- Need help with making your electronic resources accessible?
- Other resources
Overview
Technology can be used in many ways to advance teaching and learning. Presentation technology, like PowerPoint, can be used to support classroom activities. Interactive exercises and multimedia may be delivered via the World Wide Web. E-mail, discussion boards and chat offer options for communicating electronically between teacher and student or student-to-student. Library reserves are linked to courses via the My UW–Madison portal. A course-management system such as Learn@UW, brings together various online tools including “quizzing” and “gradebook” to make course management more convenient and to make information more readily available to students.
UW–Madison offers many resources to assist you in using technology in your teaching. Many colleges, schools and departments plus the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) have staff to work with you. They will help you determine how technology might fit into your teaching and will help you select the appropriate technology and learn how to use it. They may also assist with finding funding and with developing technology applications.
DoIT’s Getting Started includes information about support for instruction, training, policies facilities, grants and funding sources.
My UW–Madison is a personal gateway to important campus computing services. My UW provides students, faculty and staff with an easy-to-use, secure gateway to online information. More than just another Web site, My UW–Madison offers an impressive array of personalized services that can help instruction for students and faculty.
What do you want to use technology for?
The University of Maryland University College publishes a Web site that outlines various teaching and learning activities and suggests examples of how each might utilize technology to accomplish specific learning objectives. Each example represents a different discipline; more than 40 disciplines are represented in the examples.
What are some successful practices?
The University of Maryland University College also presents extensive information about realities and successful practices in online course delivery, with particular attention paid to ways of encouraging interactivity as a key influence on students’ learning styles. Prominent emphases include strategies for managing the use of technology in research assignments, small-group projects, discussions and other activities that foster interaction.
Active Learning with PowerPoint is an on-line tutorial offered by the Center for Teaching and Learning Services at the University of Minnesota.
Is there a repository of teaching materials?
MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected here, along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments.
What technologies can I use?
Learn@UW, the new e-Learning system for UW–Madison, enables individual instructors to create course Web sites with state-of-the-art communication, collaboration, content delivery and student assessment capabilities. It can be used for developing stand-alone online courses for distance education or for creating resource rich Web sites to supplement campus courses. The Learn@UW development environment requires little or no Web programming expertise. Learn@UW is delivered through a new course management technology called Desire2Learn.
DoIT provides UW–Madison faculty and staff with current information, examples and resources related to streaming video and audio.
Instructional Communications Systems (ICS) has been serving the teleconferencing and distance education needs of the UW System institutions and other public agencies since 1965. Today, a variety of state-of-the-art communication technologies managed and supported by ICS assists university faculty and staff, and and many others to reach students, colleagues and clients throughout Wisconsin and the world.
ICS-managed technologies include: WisLine, an international conference-call service, satellite videoconference services, dialup and IP Interactive videoconferencing, full motion fiber optic videoconferencing, media production facilities, audio and video streaming services, and WisLine Web, a Web conferencing service.
eCOW lists of course homepages from the College of Engineering. There is also a link for students to create their own eCow page.
An eTEACH presentation combines a video frame (Microsoft MediaPlayer) with a slide frame (Microsoft PowerPoint), an external Web links frame, a dynamic table of contents that titles the major portions of the lecture and allows jumping to any portion, buttons that allow the lecture to be advanced or rewound 10 or 30 seconds, and fast forward and reverse buttons; all in an Internet Explorer window. The PowerPoint slides and Web links automatically synchronize with the current position in the lecture video. eTEACH supports PowerPoint animation features for viewing in the browser. eTEACH supports accessibility features such as closed captioning and Web page readers.
Want to teach in a room where you have support for the use of multimedia?
Multimedia Classrooms and Distance Education Facilities is a guide to general assignment classrooms that provide some level of support for multimedia presentations. These rooms all contain video projection or display capabilities.
Do you have questions about your classlists?
Classlist is an automated no-charge system that allows faculty and TAs to have e-mail distribution lists generated based upon their course enrollment. The Classlist system automatically updates the e-mail distribution lists with Registrar data throughout the semester. Thus, student changes, e.g. add/drop or change of e-mail address information, are automatically reflected.
What about distance education?
UW-Extension Distance Education Clearninghouse is a comprehensive site that brings together distance education information from Wisconsin, national and international sources. New resources are added to the Distance Education Clearinghouse continually. The Clearinghouse is managed and maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Extension, in cooperation with its partners and other UW institutions.
Who is doing distance education?
Several full-degree programs are available via distance education through the University of Wisconsin institutions. This site lists current and future opportunities.
Need help with making your electronic resources accessible?
DoIT’s Web Accessibility Team is committed to help you make your Web pages accessible. Whether you are a webmaster, an instructor with a course on the Web or a department administrator, the team can help. The team has have instructional resources to teach you to make your own site changes, or you can hire someone to review and fix your site.
More accessibility resources are provided by the Center on Education and Work (CEW) in collaboration with the university’s McBurney Center. This program melds and streamlines faculty and staff outreach through professional-development workshops and online tutorials, creates user-friendly Web accessibility analysis, and provides technical assistance to those involved in creating and maintaining Web content.
Other resources
The Sloan Consortium(Sloan-C) aims “to help learning organizations continually improve the quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.” It has some helpful resources for instructors who want to design courses with online components or entire online courses.
The Program in Course Redesign has collaborated with 30 institutions to demonstrate how colleges and universities can redesign their instructional approaches using technology to achieve cost savings as well as quality enhancements. Redesign projects focus on large-enrollment, introductory courses, which have the potential of impacting significant student numbers and generating substantial cost savings.
The University of Maryland has an excellent website, Teaching with Technology, including many links to other resources.
Teaching with Technology Today is an online newsletter that highlights innovative uses of technology on UW-System campuses. It has symposia on practices in many different fields across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional disciplines.
Educause Review is a magazine available on-line that “takes a broad look at current developments and trends in information technology, what these mean for higher education, and how they may affect the college/university as a whole.” See, for example, the issue on the NetGen Generation, published September/October 2005.
For a basic introduction to current forms of technology resources for teaching, see Sarah E. Smith and Anthony Potoczniak, Five Points of Connectivity(also available aas a PDF file), Educause Review 40 (5), September/October 2005.