Faculty Spotlight
Faculty Spotlights
When discussing people and politics of former Soviet states, wouldn't it be nice to see who you're talking about?
Steve Hoffman uses videoconferencing to connect his students to a fellow professor and class in Belarus. This literally makes textbook topics "come alive" as St. Thomas students can personally engage with peers in a dramatically different culture. Dr. Hoffman's technologies have ranged from Skype (low-quality, but readily available) to full-motion video using a Tandberg videoconferencing unit connected to the U.S. embassy in Belarus.
Why simply write about art when you can talk about it as well?
Heather Shirey used a free commercial service named "Gcast" to engage her students in her Art History class. In addition to typical discussion board posts-and-responses, Shirey encouraged her students to phone in audio comments about the art projects they studied.
So, what did the students think? One in particular loved it and she really engaged in the process; it was easy, she enjoyed hearing the voices of classmates, and she found reading texts more time-consuming than listening to podcasts. Another liked being able to write notes in advance rather than speaking up in class. One student didn’t like the idea and said it sounded too complicated, suggesting a demo in class to explain the concept. Some didn’t want to be first but if they waited, they didn’t get around to it. In the end, the results were mixed, but the interest of those who liked it made the process
How can students document their growth in the knowledge of a new topic? By building portfolios and collaborating with wikis.
Paul Lorah provided a standard "structure" to his students, from which they built pages in the Blackboard portfolio tool. This gave them the opportunity to demonstrate an understanding of the concepts in the class in a readily-assessed format, yet one that afforded both flexibility and creativity.
Advanced reporting students spent a semester covering beats and writing articles about the Phillips and Powderhorn neighborhoods in south Minneapolis.
During Spring Semester 2006 and 2007, students posted weekly stories at blog.stthomas.edu/newssouth on topics ranging from health to religion, city government to crime. Subscribers could choose to receive weekly reminders, and were invited to read and respond to students' work. The students' work showcased St. Thomas' use of Movable Type, a blog product in pilot at UST during that time.
Read more about Lynda McDonnell in her profile on the archived 2006 NewsSouth site.
How can students best learn that PERT isn't just shampoo?
An instructor in the Decision Sciences of the Opus College of Business, Robert Gaffney uses Macromedia's Breeze Presenter (now Adobe Presenter) to engage students in business concepts. His example of the "pizza project tutorial" (describing the function of a PERT diagram) is featured as part of IRT's description of Adobe Presenter.
Playing with Google Earth is not only fun... but has some good educational uses, too.
During the January 2008 Faculty Center for eLearning seminar, Kelley demonstrated Google Earth and other similar mapping tools. These are useful not only in Geography per se, but also in ecology, marketing, and any field where "things of interest" are affiliated with some sort of location
