I was today one of 28 Tufts faculty to be awarded with an “honorable mention” at the 2013 Tufts Teaching with Technology Symposium. This mini-conference brought together faculty and staff from all schools and disciplines at Tufts to share how we’re using technology effectively to enhance learning in our classrooms. What’s great about this event is that the focus is very much on the pedagogical reasons for using technology, not just tech for tech’s sake.
As well as the award, I was asked to participate in a panel “Finding and Using High Quality Free Public Content for Teaching and Learning” together with Sheryl Barnes, the Assistant Director, Tufts Technology Services Educational & Scholarly Technology Services (ESTS) and Katy Vecitis, Assistant Professor of Sociology. I talked about how my lecture style was influenced by free online classes taught by Walter Lewin, how I use education research-based simulations from the PhET project and also demonstrations from the Wolfram Demonstrations project to help students engage with abstract ideas and as the basis for focussed in-class discussion and clicker questions. I also highlighted the role of discipline-specific repositories like www.compadre.org to help separate the “signal” from the “noise”. Following our presentations, we tried to help the audience identify resources they could use themselves.
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