Last Wednesday the second cohort of Technology Fellows met for a full day of discussion, workshops, and troubleshooting in the Advanced Technology Lab in Shain Library. Three of the five fellows, Luis Gonzalez, Hisae Kobayashi and Leo Garofalo presented their work, shared breakthroughs and challenges, and posed questions to the group.
We will be hearing from the Fellows on this blog over the course of the semester, but if you are wondering what the Fellows are doing, here some themes and a few examples from our day together.
- Connecting All three fellows that presented are connecting or plan to connect their classrooms to students, professionals and scholars around the world. Hisae is using Twitter to foster dialogue about student life between her students and students in Japan (#ccJpn201). Luis and Leo will have virtual visits and discussions with professionals in Spain and Mexico using Skype and Zoom.
- Relevance To make learning about culture and history of Spain relevant to students in Luis’s class, students monitor a Twitter list that he and Laura Little created with feeds from local news outlets. Students select articles of interest, read and share summaries of them in Spanish to fellow students. The tool used for the sharing is both Moodle forums and (soon!) Twitter. Hisae’s twitter assignment requires students to ask questions about college life in Japan and share information about college life here – using the language daily and making it relevant to their own lives.
- Critical Thinking Leo has two upcoming assignments that require students to collect original material, organize it, synthesize it, and use it to substantiate an argument. Material includes images, interviews, ephemera, video, and outside research. In the first assignment, students will create storyboard – selecting material and explaining how they would use it as evidence for their argument. The second assignment, building on the first, requires students to both create a storyboard and create a website that they will present to the class. Students will use WordPress to create the sites.
We will be meeting again for a full day in October when Ginny Anderson and Emily Morash will present their work to the group.