Introduction
Podcasting from the Instructional Development Center room 2401 of the Student Commons Building at Heartland Community College this is the IDC Podcast for the week of February 5th-9th of 2007.
IDC News and Events
Coming up this week... Beginning on Tuesday, February 6 from 1-3pm in the Instructional Development Center (IDC), Dr. Francine Armenth-Brothers and Paul Folger will be facilitating a series of 5 workshops that focus on course design and instructional best practices. Topics include Teaching Principles, Student Engagement, Teaching and Learning in Groups, Formative Assessment, and Summative Evaluation.
See our IDC website events section for more information about these new Workshops.
We would like participants to attend all five sessions as a cohort if possible. Adjunct faculty will be entitled to a small stipend as partial compensation for their time. If you are interested in attending please contact Paul Folger as soon as possible. For the first session, please bring with you (mentally or physically) examples of a course or unit within a course, that you would like to change and/or improve. We hope you can make it for these interactive workshop sessions sponsored by the IDC and by the Learning Communities Team.
Heartland Community College is starting a new speaker series titled "Your World Exposed" with topics taken from today's headlines. The first presentation to be held this week on Tuesday, February 6th is entitled "A Shrimp Among Whales: The Politics of North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Program" and will be given by Jaque L. Fuqua, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army (retired) and now Director of International Engagement, Communications and Protocol, at the University of Illinois.
The presentation will be held in the Community Commons Building Room 1406 from 7 to 8:30 pm and again it takes place on Tuesday February 6th.
This and all of the "Your World Exposed: HCC speaker series" presentations are free and open to the public. Instructors, this is an excellent opportunity to have your students attend an activity outside of class, broaden understanding of today's issues as well as a great opportunity to have online students meet each other face to face.
Future presentations included "Be Your Own Boss: a shared experience of successful business entrepreneurs" coming up in March and "Fair trade: the power of consumer choice" given in April.
For more information/ suggestions about future speakers or topics please contact IDC Director Paul Folger.
Also...did you know that faculty and staff at Heartland are eligible to attend workshops offered by Illinois State Universities Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology?
During the Spring Semester the CTLT at ISU is offering two major topics: Series I is entitled, "Improve Student Writing and Still have a Life". The next presentation is this series is to be held February 22nd from 3:30- 4:30 pm and covers "Teaching for Better Writing".
The second series is entitled, "Increasing the Yield on Your Teaching Investment" with the next presentation "Designing Action Plans for Assessing Teaching" to be held on February 14th at 8:30-9:30 am.
These presentations are held in the Instructional Resource Commons Building at Illinois State University at 301 S. Main in Normal.
For more information about these events, as well as the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology see http://www.teachtech.ilstu.edu for a complete listing of upcoming workshops and resources available.
Services Offered
In this week's Services Offered section I am going to cover Flash.
If you have ever seen any motion graphics on a web site, possibly one of those annoying pop up banners or ads with characters running across the screen, scrolling words or any type of motion... then you have seen Flash.
Unfortunately, annoying pop up ads are probably the worst instance of the use of Flash because the program is so much more powerful.
There are several really great Flash driven presentations and web sites out on the Internet.
The National Geographic incorporates Flash into many aspects of their web site especially in their maps sections as well as interactive timelines of events in history. http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/
mapmachine/index.html
The Missouri History Museum in St.Louis uses Flash to create a Virtual Fair with interactive map for their online information about the 1904 World's Fair. http://www.mohistory.org/content/fair/wf/
html/index_flash.html#
On the WebCT web site they have a section of demos of what WebCT can do and they created all of those demos in Flash. http://www.webct.com/products/viewpage?name=products_best_solution_faculty
But you might be asking what does Flash have to offer us?
Interactivity: Flash can present navigation that is user controlled so the presentation of the material is active and keeps students interest
Flash allows for immediate Feedback: the ability to quiz students understanding while reviewing materials and give them immediate feedback after they review.
Student's also control the amount and speed of the presentation allowing them to engage in the material at their own speed.
Multimedia capabilities: the ability to add audio narrations, sound music, video/visual and motion graphics. All of these can be used to grab and keep student's attention.
Flash also provides for flexibility in presentation of subjects so no matter if you are lecturing in biology or creating a presentation in zoology, Flash can be used to present all types of material.
And finally Flash can be delivered over multiple methods. Flash can be posted on HTML websites, burned to CD-ROM, or posted on WebCT. The file sizes remain relatively small for the amount of motion and sound you can add to them.
If you need assistance with having us create a flash presentation for you or any of the services we offer stop in the IDC in Room 2401 of the Student Commons Building and we can help. Hours the staff members are available are posted on our IDC web site.
Closing
That wraps up another episode of the IDC podcast... be sure to check back next week for more events and news pertaining to Heartland Community College and the Instructional Development Center. Feel free to email us if you have comments about this podcast. Just go to the IDC web site for our contact information at: http://www.heartland.edu/idc/
Thanks for listening in... signing off until next time from the Instructional Development Center. Have a great week! (is it spring yet?)