2013 Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

This panel discussion will allow attendees to gain perspective from instructors in multiple disciplines and campuses on the use of Doceri in the classroom. We will focus on strategies for improving your class through discussion and student participation. Each panelist will discuss their use of Doceri, and strategies for fostering student interaction and analysis of course materials.

This session will provide the Penn State community with an evaluation of the educational opportunities of the iPad via a look at the development of iBook materials for the online course Art 10: Introduction to Visual Studies. Through an exploration of Copyright and Fair Use policies, we provide a model that can be utilized when developing open educational resources. Lastly, it highlights the value and importance of the intercollegiate collaboration between the College of Arts and Architecture and Education Technology Services.

Bookstores are expanding their services beyond selling and buying new and used books to students. This rapidly changing marketplace now involves textbook rentals, digital content, self-publishing platforms, emergence of new reading devices, and LMS integration. During this session our campus partners will discuss these options and other services that provide support to our faculty and students.

Digital badges are of increasing interest in higher education. They hold the potential to enhance your digital identity by providing verifiable indications of formal and informal accomplishments and achievements that transcend a single course or degree. This panel represents several units at Penn State currently experimenting with digital badges. Using a standard open discussion format, the panel members will discuss their efforts, offer learned insights, and field audience questions.

Want to learn more about the Keynote Address? Join Keynote Speaker Frans Johansson for a Q&A related to his presentation.

Students at Penn State Brandywine in general education, Earth science, and independent study courses have successfully documented field experiences and created environmental case studies in iBooks Author, demonstrating successful integration of multimedia technologies and critical thinking questions for use on the iPad. This session will review the management of one set of iPads for multiple courses, and the challenges and successes of student training on the use of iPads and iBooks Author. Examples can be viewed at: http://sites.psu.edu/ipads4earthbw

A general overview about the Guided Study Groups (GSG) program will be offered by the GSG Program Manager (Dr. Angelique Bacon-Woodard) and the MATH 110 faculty lecturer (Dr. Jim Hager). The undergraduate student leaders (Edward Yu, Jason Sampat, and Lindsay Simock) will then demonstrate their different uses of the iPads, Doceri and iClickers and each will share samples of their work and how they engage students in the learning process. Audience members will be invited to participate in the use of the iPads to provide a hands-on demonstration for how the Doceri software works.

During the fall semester, faculty at multiple campuses were part of a faculty engagement grant used to promote the use of clickers in their teaching. Clickers (Student Response Systems) are wireless handheld devices that allow students to respond to classroom polls and quizzes. This session will be discussion based. The faculty leading the discussion are in different disciplines and are from different campuses. They will give a quick explanation of how they used clickers, if it made a difference in learning outcomes, and if they plan to continue to use clickers.

The naked eye has limits as to what it can see, track, and evaluate. Dartfish advanced video technology software goes beyond the human eye using new technology to investigate movement from a different angle of view. Dartfish is being used in the Kinesiology classes of Intermediate Swimming and Indoor Team Sport at Penn State Hazleton. By using Dartfish, the students visually see their own strengths and weaknesses in the water for unlimited learning. This session will explore how we analyze movement both in the classroom and research.

One of the challenges of teaching ECON 102 (Intro to MicroEconomics) is finding ways for students to place conceptual knowledge of economics into a context that means something to them. To address this issue, EconU was created, an educational game which allows players to run their own fictional university. During this session, the presenters will discuss how and why the game came to be and how it was implemented in a series of large lecture course sections, as well as a look at assessment, research, and future directions.

This session introduces augmented reality (AR) to university educators. AR augments a real physical space with virtual material such as text, photos, or videos. This session will provide hands-on demonstrations of freely available or downloadable IOS apps to create AR experiences for a variety of academic disciplines and learning communities. The session will also demonstrate educational applications of AR across a variety of academic disciplines and community institutions, such as museums or arboretums. Where possible, outcome data will be presented from our pilot work.

Learning analytics is the use of learner-produced data, analytical models, and information visualization to support educational decision making and improve student success. In this session, we will present a variety of examples of analytics systems to provide a broad perspective of: what these systems look like, how they work, and what the practical applications are for your classroom. We'll also discuss current efforts at Penn State. Our goal is to offer some basic theoretical background while focusing the majority of the session on a more interactive conversation with plenty of specific examples.

Student success, teaching pedagogy and excellence, affordability, and an effective digital transformation path—these four principles build the foundation of McGraw-Hill’s Enterprise Solutions. Working with institutions in partnership models, we create a tailored digital learnin experience and environment that is easy to use, caters to individual learning styles and
institutional outcomes, and yields measureable success. Our overview will walk through four foundational areas McGraw-Hill focuses on as well as the software services we have built to wrap around the solutions that are key drivers at Penn State so that you can achieve the highest chance for successful implementation.

Penn State's social networking platform, Yammer, was released in spring 2012. To discover it's potential for teaching and learning, Education Technology Services (ETS) initiated a Faculty Engagement project in which five select instructors at Penn State partnered with ETS to use Yammer in their teaching practices in the fall 2012 semester. In this session, two (possibly three) of these instructors will share how they used Yammer in their classes, how students responded to it, and the outcomes. The audience will have a chance to engage with these instructors through a moderated discussion.

Supervising student internships with appropriate communication can be costly and time consuming. While no replacement for on-site visits, utilizing Adobe Connect with multiple interns for weekly "check-in" meetings can ensure that a on-site visits are maximized for value and that students do not feel isolated in their internship placement.

The College of Engineering, working with cross-cultural communications experts from the Communication Arts & Sciences program, created an online learning experience to prepare students for the challenges of navigating diverse cultural environments. The project aims to better prepare students for an increasingly global workplace, including effective membership on geographically dispersed teams.

Want to learn more about the lunchtime Keynote Address? Join Keynote Speaker George Siemens for a Q&A related to his presentation.

The free web-based LucidChart is a perfect companion to the collaborative learning classroom at Penn State Lehigh Valley. First-exam results indicated that students enrolled in a peer review session using collaborative concept mapping to review fundamental biology processes scored better than students not enrolled in the review. During this session attendees will receive study results, view examples of student work and view video clips of students collaborating in the learning space. Attendees will work in groups to create a simple concept map with their choice of mapping program (options will be provided).

Cengage Learning's MindTap allows faculty to create fully digital, personal learning experience that engages students with apps and custom content while supporting differentiated learning styles. Students can make their own notes and flashcards, view a lecture, connect using social media, and access their all of their course materials from anywhere. This session will explore the options available in using MindTap as the method of increasing student engagement and improving outcomes. 

This presentation will discuss the use of role of digital storytelling in a graduate class that deals with spirituality and culture in the health and education professions from faculty, instructional designer, and student perspectives, and the connection of digital story telling to multiple forms of learning and knowledge construction processes. In this session, the presenter and attendees will: (1) discuss the role of instrumental, communicative, and emancipatory learning through digital storytelling in the class, (2) show digital stories created by students and faculty presenters; and (3) explore theoretical and practical implications of digital storytelling for teaching and learning.

Students create public service announcements about societal problems as part of their introduction to criminal justice course. Students develop research skills, focus on local community issues and resources, and produce a cohesive message for the public. Students and faculty will conduct a roundtable discussion of both the intended and unintended consequences of this assignment.

Big Data, business intelligence, educational data mining, and learning analytics are all increasingly on the radar of leaders in higher education. In this session, panelists will discuss the methods and implications of how Big Data is being used in education and industry to support decision making. Panelists will provide a variety of perspectives on this topic, including current initiatives at Penn State, and then open the floor for debate about how this might impact teaching and learning.

Piazza.com is an interactive online Q&A platform that gets students collaborating to answer their peers' questions. Answers are built and edited, wiki-style, by multiple individual students. Answers can be endorsed as "good" by students and the instructor to ensure quality control.

The flipped classroom is a revised pedagogical approach to classroom instruction that utilizes lecture-capture technologies to allow for increased quality face-to-face time.The knowledge and comprehension of material is learned by the student outside of class, which allows the application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of concepts the focus in a face-to-face classroom. The presenters will describe how classroom capture technology is utilized in an organic chemistry class to facilitate low-level learning outside of class. Assessment strategies for information gained outside of class as well as student reactions to these strategies and the flipped classroom will be addressed.

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The student-led Textbook Advocacy Group is starting conversations with students, faculty, and other stakeholders about textbooks and OERs in order to promote effective, student-centric uses of textbooks in terms of economics and pedagogy. This presentation will focus on their provocative campaign,TEXTBOOKS SUCK, and the surprising findings the group’s research efforts have uncovered about student perspectives on textbooks and OERs.

Free materials from Stanford University's School of Design (d-School) can be adapted in any course with projects where the instructor wants to encourage innovation and creative thinking. This session will introduce the d-School approach to design thinking, show the materials available for use, and give examples of faculty use within the context of project development within different content areas.

Learn how faculty and learning designers at The Smeal College of Business have partnered to turn problems into opportunities, improving student outcomes in large-enrollment classes by applying practical solutions and leveraging technologies, techniques, and tools. This session will discuss solutions applied in face-to-face, hybrid, and fully-online courses.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are among the hottest topics in higher education today. This panel discussion will include how MOOCs are already having an impact in education, emerging strategies for universities and evolving practices for development and delivery.