SPRING CONFERENCE

Friday, May 29, 2009

Connecting The .Edus:
Using Technology To Connect With Our Students

Description

Conference Format

The conference day will feature a mixture of hands-on workshops and interactive sessions, a plenary presentation, and networking opportunities.

The conference will be held at five different sites across New England and connected via video conferencing for our plenary presentation. The sites will be:

Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT

Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA

New England Institute of Technology, Warwick, RI

University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

Call for Proposals

The Program Committee invites proposals that reflect the best in research and practice of college teaching in New England.  Submissions may address all areas of teaching and learning that use technology.

• Here are a few general suggestions related to the conference theme:
  • Classroom strategies that address the use of technology to reach different student learning styles
  • Helping colleges and students bridge the technology divide
  • Helping students connect with course content in and out of the classroom
  • Supporting faculty who want/need to learn the new technology
  • Creating community out of diversity with the assistance of technology
  • Using technology to engage students of different backgrounds with peers, staff, and faculty.
  • Supporting the digital natives (our students) while developing the digital immigrants (the faculty)

There will be two types of presentations:

Hands-on Workshops (120 minutes): Computer lab-based interactive sessions that encourage participant involvement through hands-on use of a technology. These sessions will be scheduled in a computer lab.

Interactive discussions (60 minutes): Interactive sessions that present new ideas about using technology in an academic environment and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of those systems. These sessions will be scheduled in a classroom.

Conference attendees overwhelmingly prefer presentations that give them at least one concrete, practical “take-away” idea to implement at their home campuses. If your presentation concerns a particular program or experience, please articulate how it might be transferable to other contexts and institutional types.

Please refer to www.nefdc.org to review important submission guidelines and to submit your proposal online.

Submission deadline is February 15, 2009; notification of acceptance will be sent out the week of February 26, 2009.

Questions? Contact Tom Thibodeau (tthibodeau@neit.edu)