Instructional Technology has recently purchased a Personal Response System, popularly known as “clickers.” PRS is a technology now widely used in classrooms, conferences, and meetings, and even television shows, to gather interactive and immediate audience input.

We have purchased two different types of clicker receiver systems: one which plugs into a computer and allows the speaker to present questions using PowerPoint slides; and one with a handheld device that can collect the responses anywhere. We have fifty “clickers” which can be used with either receiver.

The PRS system is now available for check out from the Media Checkout Desk.

Be aware that you will need to install software before use on a computer with the computer receiver version. If you intend to use this in an e-classroom or computer lab, be sure to call the HelpDesk in advance to schedule the software install.

See the PRS Clicker Resource page for more information, instructions on use, and software download links.

Thursday the 14th UPS hosted a workshop on Web 2.0 Digital Storytelling, lead by Bryan Alexander, Director of Research at NITLE, held in Wyatt Hall. Numerous UPS faculty attending the workshop, as well as visitors from other colleges.

• A workshop wiki of resources is available to all online at NITLE, as is a bibliography of resources about this topic.

• During the workshop, resources mentioned and used were tagged at Delicious with upsdst2008.

• Note that one of the resources the workshop worked with was VoiceThread. Instructional Technology is interested in VoiceThread as a tool - check out the iTech VoiceThread information page, including our own get started video tutorial.

UPS is a member of the NITLE consortium of schools, which promotes the use of technology appropriate to instruction in The Liberal Arts. Contact Peggy Firman, the UPS liaison to NITLE, for more information.

We have added a tutorial page and video about VoiceThread.

VoiceThread is an online voice and video enabled forum. In it, you can create “threads” for presenting sequences of pictures, videos, and text. You can then allow others to comment on your thread, so a group can produce threads together. VoiceThread can produce highly collaborative, media-rich projects, but is very simple to use, since it is based on the conversational tools from the traditional online forum.

Our work on VoiceThread is part of our participation in the Language Technology Bootcamp hosted by The Foreign Language Resource Center of Pomona College.

Dana Flaskerud, of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Randy Thornton, Instructional Technology, represented UPS at the Bootcamp last April.

IT staff member Randy Thornton was invited to be the opening speaker at Lewis and Clark College’s annual Faculty Technology Institute on May 19th.

The topic was “Start Teaching with Web 2.0 Tools” and was an introduction for faculty who are interested in starting to add Web 2.0 tools such as tagging, blogging, wikis and social network to their teaching repertoire. Several UPS faculty sites were used as examples, including some on the Showcase.

The slides of the presentation are available here on Google Docs.

We’ve released the latest addition to the Digital Teaching Showcase: Geoff Proehl on Oberon, the Theatre Arts wiki. Click here to see the video or go to the Showcase tab on the navigation bar above!