TEACH!

Technology for Engagement, Assessment, and Communication in Higher education is our first foray into offering the popular Faculty Instructional Technology Summer Institute to an external audience. "FITSI" has been offered on the Durham campus of the University of New Hampshire since 2002. We've taken the best of the sessions from FITSI and created a 3-day program that will offer time for discussing approaches to teaching as well as time for actually trying the technologies that will be introduced.

TEACH! will be offered July 15-18, 2008 at the New England Center on the campus of the University of New Hampshire. Staff from UNH's Computing & Information Services Academic Technology department will host the event.

FITSI 2008 is a lot of fun!

I'm having a lot of fun at FITSI this week. I get to work with a lot of really smart people, so it's been very stimulating. "FITSI" is the Faculty Instructional Technology Summer Institute at the University of New Hampshire. It's a week long intensive program with presentations from guest speakers, panels with UNH faculty, hands on workshops, and round tables that feature one-on-one help.

Even though technology plays a major role at FITSI, pedagogy takes center stage. Faculty have many opportunities throughout the week to discuss teaching with their colleagues around campus. All disciplines from business to health services to engineering to the humanities and social sciences are represented. Faculty from past FITSIs tell us that talking to other faculty is the best part of FITSI.

FITSI 2008 participants: Post a comment and tell us what your favorite part of FITSI has been.

Check us out at http://cis.unh.edu/fitsi.

Nursing Students: How to make a link to a file

To make a link to a file is a several step process. It involves using Google Docs & Spreadsheets to upload your files. Once your files are uploaded, you publish them. Once you publish them, you are given a URL. Copy this URL and paste it into your Nursing blog.

To access a file that contains the directions for this process, Click Here.

How might I use a blog in teaching?

"A blog will only be effective for students in their learning (and for your teaching) if it is relevant to the learning context being provided or developed. From a student's point of view the most pragmatic way in which this is understood is in terms of assessment - if a blog is used but contributes nothing to their final result, then it can be very hard to encourage students to use a blog."

Sebastian Fiedler, Seblogging
Link to the rest of the text.

Using blogs to integrate technology in the classroom
The link below includes some good information about blogs as well as links to additional references.
Link to Teaching Today

How do I get started?

First, you need to create a blog. There are several organizations that offer free services:

http://www.blogger.com (in four steps you're a blogger)

http://www.livejournal.com/

http://beblog.com

Why create a blog?

How do you engage students outside of class? Invite them to create and share a blog. It's very simple to create, post to, and read postings on a blog. And it's easy to share your blog. In a class, you can encourage students to post their thoughts on a reading, class discussion, group project, etc. A student blog makes it possible to share their thoughts with you and other students in the class.

Reading your students' blogs can be made more efficient by using an aggregator. During this FITSI 2008 session, you'll be introduced to Google Reader.