Educational Technologies in colleges

Écrit par Rafael Scapin

Mardi, 03 Mars 2009 13:27

We here at Dawson College are always striving to stay abreast of new educational technologies. To ensure that both our faculty and student body benefit from all that today's technologies have to offer, we are reaching out to other institutions such as yours.

We would like to ask you what kind of new educational technology software/hardware you are currently using in your CEGEP. For example, we are considering using SmartBoards at Dawson. As we research the usage of available tools, it is our hope that you may share with us the different approaches you have implemented.

Thank you!

Réponses :

Établissement	suggestion
John Abbott Brenda Lamb	Mark Stephen of Marianopolis has sent out a somewhat similar inquiry to yours, so perhaps the two of you can produce one compilation. The JAC Physics Department are using a Smartboard and Mark was provided with the name of the person to contact, who manages the Smartboard. Rather then have each of you contact the person separately, I recommend that I set up a conference call for you, Mark and myself to speak with them at the same time. Or perhaps, even better, a live demonstration of the product could be arranged for you both. Let me know which approach you would prefer. (You too Mark – let me know what your preference is). The Physics Department is also launching the LON-CAPA system for their online adaptive learning module. Faculty in other departments will also be able to use it for their online quizzes. Let me know if you would like more information on this and I can arrange a conference call or meeting. N.B.: The LON-CAPA project has not yet been formally announced in the College, so I would appreciate it if you would not distribute this particular information for now, until we have had a chance to advance a bit further with the project. I would think that formal announcements in the College will be made in a few weeks, however, I will let you know once this has taken place.
Marianopolis Mark Stephen	As Brenda has noted, I made a similar inquiry (almost to the word!) with theRepTICs about a month ago that you must have missed reading... I am attaching the information that I collected in response to that query. Hopefully you can add yourself to it and share it with me, and the rest of the network as well. It would be nice to have this up to date and referred to regularly so that we can all share our experiences rather than each reinvent the wheel. With respect to smartboards, we have purchased one, but have run into a complication with respect to the physical infrastructure: if the media projector is not mounted high enough (requiring a relatively high ceiling) you will be standing in your own shadow when using the board, and thus blocking the projection of the screen that you wish to interact with. Unfortunately many of our classes have lower than ideal ceilings...
Vanier Marleigh Greaney	Here at Vanier we are currently using clickers from Einstruction, Sympodiums, and SynchronEyes in some labs. We do have one SmartBoard, but it has not proven to be very popular. However, this is likely due to a lack of training and the fact that our board is a mobile unit and teachers have to "sign it out" to use it - highly inconvenient. These are the only "classroom" tools that we are using at the moment.