Tech Academy 2009

Welcome

The facilitators for this group of the Tech Academy participants have been meeting and we are eager to get started next Wednesday.

First, if you have any content — scripts, video, pictures, sounds, etc. — that you might want to use for your project, please bring it. 

Creating content will be first on the curriculum and having content you can use is helpful.

Second, we have worked out a tentative curriculum for the four days though it is liable to change as you learn technologies and as we see what you are planning. We will start with a brief set of pedagogical questions which we will discuss repeatedly over the four days of the session. We will then move to an introduction to podcasting using GarageBand. In the afternoon of the first day we will cover screencasting and the software to create them. After lunch and at the end of the day, we will demo some class management software that you might find helpful.

On the second day, we will show you places to put your content — blogs and Blackboard — in the morning and video editing, embedding and presentation in the afternoon. Again, we will demo small software programs for class management after lunch and at the end of the day. 

Finally, we will return to pedagogy and the questions handed out the first day.

The final two sessions will be devoted to your projects and to producing content that you will actually use in your courses.

These are long and busy sessions so be prepared for a fairly intensive four days.

The facilitators for these sessions are Tom Kinsella, Bob Heinrich, Wendel White and me (Ken Tompkins). If you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact me this weekend or any of us during the two weeks.

As I said, we are looking forward to working with you for these two weeks. We always learn as much as the participants do.

Oh, yes. If you can (unless you already have one) please register for a Twitter account (it’s free) at: http://twitter.com/ We’d like to use them for the next two weeks when we are not in session.

See you on Wednesday.