Category: Stories

Campus Tree Map – Tim Parsons

Heather Stafford / / Biology, Geography, Modelling

treemapAll

What:  Campus Tree Map

Who: Tim Parsons, Horticulturalist

Technologies used: Hardware: Dell Axim Handheld PC with a Bluetooth GPS; Software: Handheld PC running ArcPad; Desktop: ArcEditor, ArcPad, ArcPad Application Builder, Microsoft Excel, Access, and Visual Studio, Google Earth and Picassa 3.

Assistance Received: Tim received assistance with ArcGIS from Bill Hegman, GIS Specialist; and Katie Clagett and Chris Rodgers, former GIS Interns at LIS.  He also received some help from students in the Geography Department’s computer lab.

Courses: BIOL 1003, Trees and the Urban Forest, and other classes in the Biology Department. Continue reading “Campus Tree Map – Tim Parsons”

2nd Annual Pedagogy and Technology Fair – May 26th, 10:00 – 12:00, Great Hall

Heather Stafford / / Stories

Across the curriculum, Middlebury faculty are using technology in a number of creative ways to redesign, enhance, and augment their teaching and instruction. Join us in the Great Hall at McCardell Bicentennial Hall for the 2nd Annual Pedagogy and Technology Fair.

Faculty will demonstrate their uses of technology and discuss their experiences in an informal setting.  The diversity of faculty ranges from Film and Media Culture to Chemistry, This fair is co-sponsored by the CTLR and Library and Information Services. Each presenter will have a poster created for him/her by LIS. A large monitor and internet connection are also provided to enable live demonstrations. If you are interested in participating, please contact Shel Sax at extension 5679 or send email.

Wireless Projection – Chris Watters

Heather Stafford / / Biology, Discussion

ChrisWatters003-croppedTechnology used: Wireless Video Presentation System II by BlackBox
Course: BIOL0222A Human Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective (Winter 2010)
Reason for using the technology: This was a seminar course, and Chris wanted students to be able to present from their own laptops.
Received assistance from: LIS HelpDesk and Media Services

The BlackBox Wireless Video Presentation System allowed the nine students in Professor Chris Watters’ Human Nutrition class to share their work as peers rather than as presenters at a podium.  Discussion continued seamlessly through PowerPoint presentations that students ran from their own laptops.

Chris can envision other uses for this technology, including collaboration and peer review, and more simply, large projector presentations.  He first saw the BlackBox server in action at an international visualization conference in 2005.  A group would demonstrate a project, take feedback, make revisions, and present again.  When Chris learned that the server was available in the US, he mentioned it to Dean Cadoret.  Dean found the server and helped configure it with other LIS staff.

Full configuration remained difficult despite adjustments to the server, the network, and even the students’ laptops.  Some of Chris’ objectives couldn’t be met (he had hoped students would be able to pull up nutrition web pages and evaluate them as a group), but overall Chris found this experiment with new technology worthwhile.

Moving Away from Paper: Annotating and Grading Digital Documents – Jason Mittell & James Morrison

Heather Stafford / / Feedback, Film & Media Culture, IPE, Political Science, Stories, Summative Assessment

Jason Mittell (Film & Media Culture) and James Morrison (Political Science) are faculty at Middlebury who are moving towards completely paperless teaching and research.  Both cite similar reasons for preferring electronic versions of papers, articles and even books.  Digital documents are simply easier to organize and access when everything else you do is on your laptop.  Having your students submit electronic versions of their assignments means that you can retain a definitive copy of all your students’ work which is handy when you need to write references, find model essays from past classes to guide your current students or search for evidence of plagiarism.  This case study will focus on receiving and grading electronic versions of student papers.

Continue reading “Moving Away from Paper: Annotating and Grading Digital Documents – Jason Mittell & James Morrison”

Online Placement Exam – Prof Nancy O’Connor

Heather Stafford / / Curriculum Placement, Stories, Summative Assessment

All the Language departments and Language Schools at Middlebury require students to take a placement exam before enrolling in language courses or programs in order to ensure students take courses at a level appropriate to their knowledge of the language they want to study.  Amongst language departments, the Spanish department was the first to create an online version of their placement exam in a web application referred to as Measure.  Prof. Nancy O’Connor used the Spanish department exam as a guide for developing an exam for students of French.

The exam contains about 90 questions, most of which are either multiple-choice or cloze type questions, and progresses from easier points of grammar — verb conjugation in the present, possessive and demonstrative adjectives — to more difficult ones — choice between past tenses, use of the conditional and the subjunctive.  There is a section to test reading comprehension, consisting of questions concerning a short text. The exam is configured to allow students to access the questions only once and has a time limit of 1 hour 15 minutes.  Student answers are saved to a database and scores can be exported into a spreadsheet.  Results from this exam determine what level courses students are allowed to take at Middlebury.”

Extending the Textbook – Prof Kyoko Davis

Heather Stafford / / Formative Assessment, Stories, Supplementary Material

Prof. Kyoko Davis has never been fully satisfied with the audio resources included with any of the textbooks used by the Japanese dept. The Japanese dept currently uses Genki, An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese. To supplement the audio resources that accompany this textbook, Prof. Davis has recorded additional audio material for students, some of this audio contains material from the textbook that is not in the accompanying resources, some contain alternative versions that are presented at a faster and/or slower pace and some contain supplementary material.

One area of study that Prof. Kyoko has focused on is vocabulary instruction. She has worked with Media Services to record hundreds of vocabulary items and used a spreadsheet to document all the metadata for each item including Hiragana, Katagana and Kanji representations of a given word, its English translation, grammatical categorization and information about lessons it appears in. All of this information was then imported into a database that was accessed by a web application she helped design for vocabulary study that allows students to specify items they know and don’t know, tracks their study habits and generates quizzes customized to their particular knowledge of the items studied.

Technologies:

Uses » Audio » Record/edit/format audio, Share audio on the web

Tools » Audacity, Voice Recorders, Microphones, iPods

Podcasting Lectures – Prof. James Morrison

Heather Stafford / / IPE, Political Science, Supplementary Material

Technology Used: Podcasting
Course: PS0304 International Political Economy (Spring 2009)
Number of Students: 31
Objectives: To better serve the students and democratize education.
Anticipated Learning Outcomes: Better retention and understanding
Actual Learning Outcomes: Some on both fronts

Summary of Poster Session: James Morrison explained how he uses podcasts to record his lectures so that after class, students can review the lectures. “Students can double check difficult, complicated concepts; Overcome language barriers; Get Missed Material. ** Note: My podcasting had no noticeable influence on lecture attendance! **“.   Continue reading “Podcasting Lectures – Prof. James Morrison”

Facebook in Large Lecture Courses – Professor Jeff Byers

Heather Stafford / / Chemistry, Discussion

Technology Used: Facebook
Courses: Organic Chemistry 2  (implemented twice), and Advanced General Chemistry (implemented once)
Number of students: Approximately 70 in Organic Chemistry 2, and approximately 25 in Advanced General Chemistry

Photo by Carrie Macfarlane

When Professor Jeff Byers, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, was looking for an online discussion tool for Organic Chemistry 2 (Chem 242) and Advanced General Chemistry (Chem 107), he wanted to find a tool that was student-centric.  “I did not want this to be ‘top down’ — the students get enough of me,” he says.  His students were already on Facebook, so he opened a forum there (see Middlebury Orgo Spring 2009). Continue reading “Facebook in Large Lecture Courses – Professor Jeff Byers”

Pedagogy & Technology Fair

Heather Stafford / / Disciplines, Stories
Library, Harmon Reading Area, Thursday, June 4, 10:30 am – 12:00

From Facebook in a chemistry course to video projects in First-Year Seminars, Middlebury faculty are using technology in a number of creative ways to re-design, enhance and augment their courses.  Join us in the Great Hall at McCardell Bicentennial Hall where a number of faculty will demonstrate their uses of technology and discuss their experiences in an informal setting.  This fair is co-sponsored by the CTLR and LIS.

Holly Allen, Mary Ellen Bertolini, Jeff Byers, Bryan Carson, Alex Chapin, Kyoko Davis, Chris Fastie, Anne Knowles, Marc Lapin, Carrie Macfarlane, Jonathan Miller-Lane, Caitlin Myers, James Morrison, David Rosenberg, Steve Trombulak, Andy Wentik, Helen Young.