Yesterday Haydn and I presented a workshop on using Twitter, titled “Using Twitter to Teach.”  It was a two hour affair, the first hour dedicated to presenting the terminology, techniques and procedures to physically use Twitter, the second dedicated to the teaching potential for Twitter.  The consensus of the group was that Twitter might be useful for sending students reminders of impending deadlines, exposing them to additional resources not presented in class or online–a sort of value added presentation–and a good way to integrate Poll Everywhere into instruction. Since we...

We had a terrific summer Tech Camp.  Thanks to all who attended.  I feel that valuable skills were obtained and hope that they will be used in your instruction in coming semesters.  We featured a number of educational tools and products during camp, and I thought I would summarize the highlights here for those who have lost their notes. The real-time Twitter polls we used were from Polls Everywhere.  The free, educational version allows a max of 32 votes.  With a little creativity and multiple instances of a poll, even a class larger than 32 can use this fun feature.  Remember, you are not limited to...

We will be conducting our annual summer tech camp August 3-6.  Don’t bother signing up because it is fully subscribed.  (Sorry).  It is still over 5 weeks away, but I thought I would review the tentative agenda we have pretty much agreed on so that attendees, and perhaps those planning similar events at other schools, will have some insight into what we are doing. Our inspiration for tech camp this year is the TED talks concept.  If you are not familiar with ted.com, rush to that web site without delay to be exposed to the best and brightest people in the world in the fields of technology,...

This is a continuation of my interview with the Academic Technology Systems Administrators about technology planning at Palomar College.  In this part we focus on some rubber meets the road issues like paperless environments, AV technologies, telephony, and lots of other issues.  The written response of the technicians is provided in the post below, and the audio of an interview with them follows the post. Additional Questions for ATRC Staff 1.  Would you support a goal of creating a paperless environment at Palomar College, if it meant that you would not have access to printers and would have to rely...

Several news items this morning are worth blogging on. First, I noted a CNet news item that Bank of America’s web site was intermittently (?) unavailable last Friday and that the bank used its Twitter feed to let customer’s know that this was the case.  Coincidentally, last Thursday I was attending a largish committee meeting where Twitter came up (actually it was a reference to our department’s use of Twitter) and the reaction among those present was uniformly negative, even hostile.  One of those ‘I don’t know what it is–I’ve never used it–and I...