By Lyndsay Bratton, Rose Oliveira, Becky Parmer, and Ariella Rotramel On Wednesday, March 8, we hosted the first annual International Women’s Day Wiki-Edit-A-Thon in Shain Library’s Advanced Technology Lab (ATL). International Women’s Day is observed throughout the world on March 8 and in some countries it is a public holiday. While celebrations in some countries…
Category: Active & Project Based Learning
Building an Italian Virtual City
One of the main challenges that I face in my second semester of elementary Italian is to strike a balance between meeting the needs of the students who want to continue studying the language and the needs of those who are not interested in continuing any further. How do I keep the former motivated and…
Building a New Approach to Online Discussions
Earlier this semester, I experimented with a “virtual class” on a day when snow closed down the college. Had there been class, students would have discussed a reading in small groups. Typically during these sessions, students spend roughly 2/3 of the class period working through discussion questions. The final 1/3 is spent debriefing with the…
Active Engagement and Group Work at the Visualization Wall
The Diane Y. Williams ’59 Visualization Wall in the Technology Commons of Shain Library offers new possibilities for group work and classroom engagement. With just a few clicks on one’s own smartphone, tablet, or laptop, the wall wirelessly displays up to five devices at once. Biology Professor Martha Grossel used the Visualization Wall weekly for…
Help Diversify the Largest Encyclopedia in the World through Wikipedia Assignments
Last week several librarians, instructional technologists, and faculty met virtually with a representative, Samantha Erickson, from the Wiki Education Foundation. This is the same organization that Ariella Rotramel and Andrea Lanoux worked with on their recent Wikipedia assignments. The meeting was inspirational! Wikipedia is the 7th most visited site in the world with content from…
Bringing Theory to Practice through Kitchen Technologies
“Even a pencil is technology,” declared my colleague Anthony Graesch during one of my first Technology Fellows Program meetings. This little statement pushed me to broaden my concept of technology in the classroom. What kinds of technology was I already using? “Food and the Senses” (ANT 353) is the title of a course I am…
WordPress for Reflecting, Creating, Sharing, and Contributing
WordPress is an easy-to-use, yet robust, blogging and website development platform. The College now hosts WordPress, giving you and your students the ability to create professional-looking websites on the conncoll.edu domain that have the potential to reach well beyond the classroom. Last week in our Teaching with Technology workshop we described WordPress’s many functions and…
Adding Voices to Scholarship: Wikipedia Editing
I developed my Fall 2015 Feminist Theory course with metaliteracy as a learning objective to assist students in studying theory in context. Metaliteracy is a framework that promotes critical thinking and collaboration in a digital age (Mackey & Jacobson). The focus on metaliteracy helped challenge students’ common understandings of theory as distanced from empirical research…
Technology Assignments When You Are Not the Expert: Part II
Perhaps because InDesign was as new to me as it was to my students, changing a course project by incorporating new software felt like a bold move. With the support of faculty and staff peers, however, I began the project confident and prepared with what I offer to you as recommended practices: Make sure the…
Technology Assignments When You Are Not the Expert: Part I
As covered previously on Engage, lynda.com can be a treasure trove for faculty looking to brush up skills in various applications (i.e. Photoshop) and even strengthen habits in life skills such as time management. For me, Lynda is like one of those old friends you don’t get to see very often but when you do,…