Duke Instructional Technology Showcase 2008

Join us in the afternoon for our Invited Teaching Demonstrations. In these fast-paced interactive sessions, exemplary faculty from a variety of departments and schools at Duke will demonstrate methods and activities they are using in courses to improve learning and engage students. Discuss new ideas for activities you can try in your own classes with colleagues from the Duke community.

Door prizes will be given away and Locopops will be served during the sessions!

Faculty and student demonstrations, listed by primary presenter (last name)

Blood-Siegfried | Crumley | Glass | Haagen | Karagoz | Kilpatrick | Kingsolver | Koslovsky | Malone | Lee | Neece | Porcarelli | Perz-Edwards | Quammen | Reisinger | Rodriguez | Russell | Sachsenmaier | Trotter | Ramirez-Trujillo | Verhoeven

Jump to: 1:20-1:45 | 1:50-2:15 | 2:20-2:45

1:20 - 1:45 - Von Canon A & B

Wimba Voice Tools in an Online Nurse Practitioner Clinical Course
Kathryn Trotter, School of Nursing
Wimba Voice Tools was used in this online cohort of Nurse Practitioner students who were located throughout NC, SC, and Tennessee. Since on campus sessions were impossible and several assignments were best accomplished with verbal rather than written completion, Wimba Voice Tools was used. Specifically, self introductions, chart dictation, movie review, and response to ethical dilemmas were accomplished. It provided a more spontaneous medium to allow more flowing expression of thoughts and feelings to be shared.

Web 2.0 and Medical Outreach in the Developing World
Linda Lee, Biostatistics & Bioinformatics
Since 1994, Duke University Medical Center has fielded 11 medical outreach teams to rural Honduras through an interdisciplinary course, “Exploring Medicine in Other Cultures.” The teams include students, alumni, faculty and staff in a variety of clinical and nonclinical programs in the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and the Environment. For the last 6 years, in partnership with Heifer International, the Duke teams have provided limited short-term outpatient clinical care and health education for several small isolated mountain communities in the department of Intibuca, and for indigenous communities of Mayan descendants displaced from their ancestral lands near the town of Copan. The team has experimented with a number of technologies to foster communication with family and friends while traveling in country. This presentation will review the evolution from zero communication while outside the United States to the use of satellite phones and laptops to communicate through a team blog.

Using Short Film Clips to Teach Psychopathology and Enliven the Classroom Experience
Karen Kingsolver, Physicians Assistant Graduate Program
Lights, camera, and educational action! From 8 to 5 each day, our students sit in a darkened classroom, listening to PowerPoint lectures. Psychology, in that setting, can sound like “psycho-babble” to the dazed students. Short film segments illustrate points vividly and efficiently, saying in a quick story line and psychopathology portrayal what would take far longer to describe as a set of lecture/teaching points. With the magic of movies, the students’ emotions are engaged and the potential for learning is greatly increased.

The approach presented here demonstrates how brief movie clips are used along with traditional lecture material. A variety of brief (2 to 3 minute) clips will be shown to illustrate the use of humor, difficult emotion, and multiple character descriptions.

Beyond Bullets, Text and Scanned Slides: Using MS PowerPoint Animations to Enliven the Classroom Experience
Alexander Glass, Earth and Ocean Sciences
Love it or hate it: PowerPoint is quickly becoming the presentation format of choice, replacing the traditional chalkboard, overhead, and slide sets. Although educators have adopted the new technology, many have done little to also adapt their lecturing style to the new medium. At best, old scanned slides now appear with new, colorful labels written in fancy fonts or, at worst, students are “PowerPointed-to-death” by too much information and the ever-varying, distracting “custom animated” fly-in text bullet. Not surprisingly, PowerPoint has earned critics in the education community and among students.

The alternative approach presented here demonstrates how PowerPoint custom animations can be used effectively in replacing the old text and bullet format and move learning from the monotonous text and line-drawing to a visually interesting and captivating experience. PowerPoint provides the means to replace sleepy diagrams and graphs, with real-time, two- or three-dimensional animations. This allows for the visual demonstration of concepts that are otherwise difficult to describe verbally. Animations also provide a means to interject humorous “interludes” and thus capture the attention of the audience and relax the teaching atmosphere. Examples are taken from classroom lectures in the earth sciences but are readily adaptable to other fields.

Italian 103: Laughing is a Serious Matter
Amaryllis Rodriguez, Romance Studies
These video projects aimed to introduce students to a unique aspect of Italian society, history and culture: the art of Italian comedy and its distinctive sense of humor. They were fashioned to identify comic elements in Italian literary, theatrical, operatic and cinematic performances, and to reproduce them in order to recognize through a new and personal perspective, the difficulty entailed in creating comedy in Italian and with an “Italian style”.

Using Video to Train Service Learning Tutors
David Malone, Education
Each semester it is estimated that more than 300 Duke undergraduates serve as tutors to local school children. Often these undergraduate tutors have minimal training. In spring 2007, five undergraduates decided to create a video of a tutoring session that could be used to train future tutors. Professors Jan Riggsbee and David Malone (Education), along with Anastasia Maddox (Community Affairs) and Shawn Miller (CIT) met with these students in the fall 2007 semester to develop a training video. We began by discussing the areas Duke tutors appear to need training in and working through all the logistical matters. Working with CIT we borrowed the necessary equipment and the students began filming. By the end of the semester we created our first draft of the video. In January we showed the film to a class of 40 students each of whom is serving as a tutor. We collected feedback and we have begun the film revision process. Our goal now is to improve the training video and add supplementary supportive materials (such as pop-up questions and reflection activities). We hope to make the video accessible via the web so undergraduates in service learning classes can view it prior to tutoring.

Using a Tablet PC to Enhance PowerPoint Lectures
Alyssa Perz-Edwards, Biology
I use PowerPoint in my lecture courses primarily to display photomicrographs of biological data. While PowerPoint is a great tool for showing images, it is also easy to put together a lecture that is too fast-paced and not interactive. I have found that a tablet PC is a great way to incorporate images of living things into lectures while at the same time using the tablet PC functions to interact with students in my classes. Drawing step by step schematics of complicated processes, making lists of student-generated hypotheses and annotating diagrams are all ways I have used a tablet PC. I have found it to be a particularly powerful tool for a non-traditionally structured course using team-based learning. In this model students learn basic concepts outside of class and spend class time taking short assessments and solving advanced problems. The tablet PC is ideal for “just in time” teaching when assessments reveal concepts that are still unclear. Although using a tablet PC has required that I learn a new operating system, I have found it has helped me to make my classroom more interactive.

1:50 - 2:15 - Von Canon A & B

Can You Hear Us Now?: Wimba Audio Comments for Teacher and Peer Review
Vicki Russell, University Writing Program
Instructors who have writing as part of their courses are constantly seeking ways to improve student writing and facilitate more active student engagement in the revision process. Although most students indicate they prefer written comments, audio comments could ultimately be more beneficial for two key reasons. Based on data gathered from a study conducted in Spring, 2007, we determined that readers who provide audio comments focus on higher-order writing issues more often than readers who provide just written comments. Second, students spend more time thinking about the audio comments, indicating they have to interpret the reader’s comments and then make decisions about how to respond. Giving students audio feedback, or a combination of oral and written comments on their writing using the Wimba voice mail feature will most likely facilitate their development as writers.

Using Blackboard for an Internationally Entangled Course
Dominic Sachsenmaier, History
This presentation will focus on the online components of an internationally entangled course that Dominic Sachsenmaier (History) taught in the fall of 2007. A major component of this course was a cooperation with parallel seminars at Fudan University/China and the University of Leipzig/Germany. Students from all three participating locations communicated through specifically modified Blackboard website.

Portal to Papahanaumokuakea
Stacie Koslovsky, Duke University Marine Lab
In January 2008, nine Master’s of Environmental Management students and two professors traveled to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge for the first time as a part of the Marine Conservation Biology course offered at Duke University Marine Lab. Limited access is offered to this part of the world because of the unique resources found there and the importance of the habitat for breeding seabirds. This unprecedented field trip was thoroughly documented through a weblog hosted on the Nicholas School website. This technology enhanced our experience by allowing us to share our adventures with others in real time and receive feedback from our readers throughout the fieldtrip.

Blogs vs. Discussion Boards in a Clinical Course
Jane Blood-Siegfried, School of Nursing
Clinical courses pose a unique set of problems for the online educator. We use discussion boards, small group discussion boards and Blogs to engage our students and encourage critical thinking. These tools are especially important when we have large class sizes. Each method of engaging students has its own strengths and weaknesses. But a combination of both can be used effectively for clinical problem solving and skill development.

Using Wimba Voice Boards to Increase Oral Communication: French 63 Audio Journals
Sandra Valnes Quammen, Romance Studies
During the 2007-2008 academic year, third-semester French classes have been piloting an audio journal project which allows students to view and respond orally to authentic video clips using Blackboard’s Wimba Voice Board tool. Over the course of this four-part project, students work within the framework of their course textbook to record 1- to 2-minute responses to a variety of videos found on news programs or video filesharing sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion. These “audio journals” are then evaluated on the accuracy of vocabulary and grammar used as well as the development of students’ ideas. The goals of this project are two-fold: first, to increase student oral production outside of the classroom and to draw students’ attention to the expression of their ideas in French; and also, to expose students to small samplings of French culture and current events which are directly related to the content students work with in class.

Tablet PCs in the Writing Classroom
Betsy Verhoeven, University Writing Program
I will offer a brief and interactive presentation on uses for the tablet PC for improving student writing. Because strong academic writing requires that students absorb scholarly sources like journal articles with which they are rarely familiar, I will begin by showing how my class used Journal Notes to create a copy of an article from the Quarterly Journal of Speech, which we then marked up to clarify the way the organizational features aid in understanding the article. We also used this exercise to locate specialized vocabulary and to practice using it in our own writing, and to clarify the ways scholars present other scholars’ work as a springboard for their own. Then I will use several examples of student writing to show how the tablet PC can serve in whole-class writing workshops. The issues we covered in these exercises range from broad-scale revision directed toward argument and evidence development to local editing issues like eliminating wordiness and following formatting guidelines.

No More Chalk! Enhancing Class Interactions and Collaborative Learning with a Tablet PC
Claudia Karagoz, Romance Studies
I have been using a tablet PC in my Intermediate Italian classes to enhance class interactions and encourage collaborative learning since the spring of 2007. I think the tablet PC is an efficient, interactive, and fun technological tool: it allows me and my students to annotate texts and images, and to complete and simultaneously display grammatical exercises. Students also use the tablet PC, in groups, to complete short in-class writing exercises that are later displayed and peer-reviewed by their classmates. The tablet PC is also environmentally friendly: it reduces paper consumption (handouts), and eliminates the potential health risks of inhaling chalk powder and malodorous chemicals (dry erase markers) in class. In addition to using the tablet PC to annotate PowerPoint presentations and Word documents, during class I use Windows Journal as a white board to present examples and new vocabulary, and Ink Flash Cards for quick grammatical and vocabulary reviews.

2:20 - 2:45 - Von Canon A & B

Teaching Language with Wimba
Angela Porcarelli, Romance Studies
One of the challenges of teaching language is to create opportunities to use the second language in a way that simulates full immersion even when such an experience is not possible in reality. Because of its user-friendly format, Wimba is the ideal tool to serve this purpose, allowing the teacher to extend the class time and involve students in multi-tasks activities where they can practice a variety of skills (speaking, listening, writing) In my presentation I would like to give some examples of possible uses of Wimba in the language classroom to both engage the students’ interest as well as improving their second language skills.

Cell Phone ESL
Lucy Haagen, Program in Education
I will present early findings of a pilot project I’m working on with the help of Kirk Griffin, through which Duke students are using cell phones as a means of motivating and teaching a group of ESL and remedial Freshman high schoolers. We will share barriers to effective technology use in a typical high school and how we are seeking to overcome them.

Innovating the Essay: A Wiki Pilot
Deb Reisinger, Romance Studies
Reisinger will demonstrate a pilot wiki project implemented in her French 100 course, “Cultural and Literary Perspectives”. The project, which replaced the traditional essay assignment, had several pedagogical and curricular goals. In addition to incorporating more linguistic skills (including speaking and reading), the interface of the wiki allowed students to engage in French culture in a space that showcased their creativity. Students had two choices for their initial project: 1) to develop a pastiche based on class readings by Proust and Barthes that evoked a personal culinary memory or 2) to develop an analytical project that investigates one of the French government’s cultural endeavors (i.e., Fête de la musique, Vélib). In addition to showcasing individual wikis, Reisinger will share project timeline, discuss specific challenges, and outline plans for future wiki projects.

Blogging in the Advanced Grammar and Writing Classroom
Robert Kilpatrick, Romance Studies
This proposal outlines a way to enhance student motivation and learning in the advanced grammar and writing language class through the use of Blackboard’s blog function. This tool provides a space where students form a sense of community through a public (within the class) expression and exchange of ideas while making the students themselves responsible for determining content. In doing so it addresses several challenges that typically emerge in advanced grammar and writing courses, most notably the risk of neglecting the goal of proficiency because of an increased focus on the analysis of grammatical structures and specific types of academic writing assignments such as the formal summary, the argumentative essay and close literary analysis of a text. The blog tool on Blackboard allows students to write in a foreign language without having to conform to a rigid set of guidelines and without being strictly graded on the accuracy of their vocabulary and grammar. The blog thus helps students overcome “the fear of the blank page” and anxieties related to assessment by encouraging spontaneous writing. Finally, this tool allows students to express themselves in a variety of formats, which lets students who are increasingly technologically savvy personalize their blog.

Using the Blackboard Wiki for In-Class Peer Feedback
Hugh Crumley, The Graduate School & the Center for Instructional Technology
In the course GS 305 (”Instructional Uses of Technology”) we have used the Blackboard wiki tool for in-class for peer feedback on both drafts of student teaching statements and for feedback on iterations of student web site design. This activity is very straightforward, students “get it” very quickly and engage in substantive feedback & reflection, and it models how wikis work beyond Bb.

UMPCs for Research
Brenda Neece, Music
CIT kindly enabled me to explore the use of the Sony Vaio Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) for use in musicology teaching and research. The UMPC proved to be an extremely useful tool as a presentation device, a substitute for a laptop (particularly when traveling), and for use in libraries and museums — particularly when working with manuscripts or objects. While the current model’s stability is not stellar, the UMPC has incredible potential for use in both teaching and research.

The Tablet PC as a Useful Tool in the Classroom and in Grading
Elizabeth Ramirez-Trujillo, Romance Studies
The objective of using the tablet PC in this writing class was mainly to assist in the classroom using different programs; for example, PowerPoint, Windows Journal, Ink Flash Cards and Word. These programs are very helpful in order to show grammar corrections, texts that need to be analyzed in class, test reviews, among other tasks. The tablet PC allows us to add corrections and comments to texts or assignments as students remain engaged in the task together with the instructor. On the other hand, the tablet PC can be very helpful for the instructor while grading written assignments. There are several advantages while using the tablet PC for grading, for example: it saves time and paper; you can also use the rubric of the assignment that is being graded; students receive their feedback by email; we keep record of the feedback we give our students for future reference; and also, we can use repeated errors and project them in class when we believe it is necessary.