Faculty Support Services for Teaching with Technology

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These hands-on workshops are free and open to academic faculty, researchers, and instructional support staff. For more information and to register, visit cornell.veplan.net/Education/catalog.aspx?c=652.

Interested in learning to use Blackboard, but can’t attend a class? Our online videos are an easy way to learn the material that is covered in the Blackboard classes.
To see the videos, visit https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/FSSDOC/Blackboard+Training+Videos

Getting Started with Blackboard

January 19, 1:30 to 3pm
January 21, 1 to 2:30pm
112 Mann computer lab

Blackboard is an online tool that lets you deliver course materials, online quizzes, and much more. This hands-on workshop will get you started with setting up your class in Blackboard. 

Blackboard Assessments and Communication Tools

January 19, 3 to 4:30 pm
January 21, 3 to 4:30pm
112 Mann computer lab

In this class, we will explore some of Blackboard's more advanced features, including grading, creating assignments, and using forums and chat. This class is designed for people who are already using Blackboard or who have attended the Getting Started class.

Administering Surveys with Checkbox

January 20 from 2 to 3:30 pm
112 Mann computer lab

Learn how to create and deploy surveys using Checkbox, the new online survey building and deployment tool supported by CIT. 

Coming Soon!

We are collaborating with the Center for Teaching Excellence to integrate academic technology with their workshop topics. Beginning in spring 2010, where appropriate, the workshops will include information about the technologies that can be used for the topic being explored.

Find out how Cornell faculty are engaging students in collaborative learning through active learning techniques in the classroom, collective assignments, and technologies that make connections for teaching, learning, and research.

We are pleased to announce two new services, classroom technology set-up assistance and tutorial creation, offered by the Student Technology Assistance Program (STAP). All STAP services are available free of charge to faculty, academic staff, researchers, and TAs in support of a class. 

To request a STAP service, email STAP@cornell.edu.

Classroom technology set-up assistance

Are you new to teaching with technology? Or have you delayed trying out some new technology in your class because you’re concerned that it won’t work when you need it? Student technology assistants can help you get the technology ready for your class, and can even attend the beginning of the class to make sure that everything goes smoothly. 

Tutorial creation service

Interested in adding an online component to your course? You might want to consider using an online tutorial. A recent Department of Education study has found that combined online and face-to-face learning is more effective than in-person classes alone. One option for adding an online component to your course is through tutorials. 

STAP now has the tools to convert your Word documents into friendly, intuitive tutorials that can be shared on a web site or in Blackboard. Tutorials may include audio, video, quizzes, and pop-up information. 

To see a sample tutorial, visit courses.cit.cornell.edu/atc_classroom/biog/.  To read the government report, "Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning," visit
www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/opepd/ppss/reports.html#edtech.

We’ve recently introduced some new features to the Cornell Blog service to improve the use of blogs for teaching and learning. Blogs can now be set up as “Class Blogs” that offer improved account management, activity tracking, and post display options.

Class blogs allow:

•    Instructors to create and administer student accounts
•    Reports documenting post and comment activity across all student blogs
•    Display of recent student posts on the main class blog
•    An optional feature that lets readers rate blog posts
•    Display on the main class blog of highest-rated posts

Additional information about these features can be found in the FSS documentation at confluence.cornell.edu/display/FSSDOC/CU+Blog+Service#CUBlogService-class.
If you’re interested in setting up a class blog, or have questions about the CU Blog service, please email cublogs@cornell.edu.

Cornell CyberTower, the online link between faculty members and their research and alumni and the rest of the Cornell community, has had a makeover. In response to user interests, the site, whose technical side is managed by FSS, has been redesigned with simpler navigation, technological upgrades, higher-quality video, and new features. Videos include captions and may be viewed full-screen with no loss of visual quality.

The new and improved CyberTower includes
•    Forums, one-on-one interviews with Cornell faculty and university leaders
•    Study Rooms, mini-courses taught by Cornell faculty members
•    Tower Topics, a new section with short videos that highlight research being conducted at Cornell

Email cybertower-mailbox@cornell.edu to discover how you can be part of CyberTower. You can experience CyberTower at cybertower.cornell.edu.

Do you require your students to evaluate and comment upon essays or professional journal articles? How about commenting upon photos or pictures, or websites? Would an electronic method of collaborative annotation free up some of your class time so that you can focus on other things? A.nnotate  and Diigo are collaborative annotation software products that may be useful for classes that require students to evaluate and comment on essays, professional journal articles, images, or websites. Faculty Support Services is currently investigating the potential of A.nnotate, which is fee-based, and Diigo, which is free.

Recent projects in FSS’s Faculty Innovation in Teaching program created a “paper-dissection” using the A.nnotate software. Science students used A.nnotate to interact with an instructor-annotated professional journal article to learn how scientific papers are constructed and written. Each article contains annotations created by the teaching assistants and the professor, with indicators of hypothesis, findings, and other common sections of a scientific paper.

The annotated articles also include pop-up questions that students can answer to test their understanding of the annotations. The software also allows users to reply to the annotations in a discussion-thread-like manner, facilitating class discussions.
If you're interested in finding out more about annotation applications, email atc_support@cornell.edu to request a demo. You can read more about collaborative annotation software in a recent paper from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, “7 Things You Should Know about Collaborative Annotation,” at www.cit.cornell.edu/news/article.cfm?id=130523.

The ePortfolio pilot, a collaboration of CIT’s Faculty Support Services and the Center for Teaching Excellence, is in full swing with approximately a dozen faculty piloting the use of ePortfolios and portfolio-based teaching and learning. The pilot team is currently reviewing various ePortfolio tools to determine which tool would best meet the needs of the campus.

Darren Cambridge, associate director of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, recently visited Cornell to talk about the benefits of ePortfolios.  Cambridge, a faculty member at the New Century College branch of George Mason University, also discussed how to implement portfolio-based teaching practices across departments, programs and courses.

If you are interested in interested in receiving an overview of ePortfolios in higher education, we strongly suggest watching the lecture, which was cosponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) and FSS.
The lecture may be viewed on the CTE blog:
blogs.cornell.edu/cte/
The supporting slideshow may be viewed at
www.slideshare.net/dcambrid/reflective-deliberation-about-integrative-evidence
To find out more about the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, visit www.ncepr.org.