The Collaborative Learning Center is offering a weekly program called Teaching w/ Technology Tuesdays. This program is for those teaching at Yale (staff, faculty, and students) interested in innovative instructional activities that utilize technology. Representatives from across campus, including the Library, ITS, the Center for Language Study, Yale College and others will provide short, informal sessions to introduce some of these approaches.

February 5 - Podcasts | Vodcasts

What?

Explore the use of Podcasting | Vodcasting in teaching. We will discuss two Yale classes that used podcasting to share ethnographic interviews with supermarket customers and the experiences of abnormal psychology experts. Podcasting engaged undergraduates in authentic fieldwork, sparked discussion, and enabled students to use each other's research to inform written assignments.

Who?

Presenters will be Mary Barr (African American Studies PhD Candidate and Instructor) and Ken Panko (Sr. Instructional Technologist in ITG)

When?

Tuesday from 11:00am -- 12:00pm

Where?

Bass Library room L01 (lower level of the Bass Library)

For the full Teaching w/ Technology Tuesdays schedule visit http://clc.yale.edu.

ITG and the Statlab have been researching flexible learning space design for some time. One of the most notable implementations of a flexible design on campus is in Urban Hall Room 102.

Click the arrow icon below to play a short video that illustrates the space's potential. Thanks to Stephanie Rosenthal, one of the group's student instructional technology assistants, for producing the video.

White Blackboards, Digital Chalk and Slate Computers?
Utilizing new technologies with traditional pedagogies

Themba Flowers
Yale University

In spring 2006, Yale’s Academic Media & Technology (AM&T) organizations were looking to determine the best practices for support of emerging technologies in their field.  We were all looking for improvements on existing techniques and solutions for known problems.

• The Instruction Technology Group (ITG) wanted to explore the use of electronic whiteboards including SmartBoards and WebsterBoards.
• The StatLab was interested in overflow solutions for their computer classroom.
• Cluster Support Services (CSS) staff were looking into imaging workflows for notebook computers.
• Media Services was looking at alternative ways of providing audio/video capabilities in smaller rooms where overhead projector installation wasn’t desirable.

Meanwhile, Faculty members were expressing renewed interest in peer-to-peer and collaborative teaching in the classroom.  Amazingly, all of these interests came together in one project.

FACULTY FOCUSED

While deciding which notebook would work best in our machine building workflow, TabletPCs arose as an alternative to standard notebooks.  Coincidentally, Professor Don Brown, Philip R Allen Professor of Economics, asked about using TabletPCs technology with his Introduction to Micro-Economics class to the manager of the StatLab since the StatLab already supported computerized instruction for Economics and other social science departments. The professor had recently gotten a slate¹ TabletPC by Fujitsu and remarked that although his handwriting was “barely legible,” the machine could translate his written pen-based input to typed text.  If he could write his lecture notes on his tablet (as opposed to the blackboard), students would be spared the task of deciphering his penmanship — even better, he could email them a copy of the lecture notes at the end of class. We wanted our notebook trial to be faculty driven and Professor Brown’s interest was timely.

PEDAGOGY

Professor Brown’s teaching style utilizes the blackboard frequently and, ideally, the students often use the blackboard as well.  Economics and finance have many basic formulas and standard charts that can be more easily understood visually then through words.  The Micro-Economics class uses standard desktop computer for the latter portion of the class for analysis.  If he was using a TabletPC instead of the blackboard, why wouldn’t we extend the same capability to the students as well?  We realized that with classroom management software along with the pen-based interactivity of the TabletPC could provide an opportunity to, as Professor Brown put it, “send all of the students to the blackboard at the same time.”  This would require every student to have a pen-based computer with the requisite software for drawing/typing an answer.

Have you been hearing the buzz about educational uses of the online world of Second Life? ITG is exploring the instructional potential for the Yale community. Interested Yale faculty or teaching fellows are encouraged to send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it to discuss ideas and get access to building space.

Here is a collection of YouTube videos related to education and the arts in Second Life compiled by the NMC Campus Observer.

Click here to link directly to the playlist in YouTube.