Posted by traubjg on Thursday, September 10, 2015 in Course Blogs, Educational Technology, Events, News.

At the Center for Teaching, we regularly consult with faculty and graduate student instructors on ways to use technology to meet their teaching and learning objectives.  Although technology use should always be driven by pedagogical priorities, sometimes instructors learn about particular technologies and want to explore ways those technologies might fit their teaching needs.  This fall, the CFT is launching three working groups to explore technologies we know have applications across the curriculum.

Collaborative Timelines – Interested in having students build online, collaborative timelines?  Tools like Tiki-Toki and TimelineJS can be used to create interactive, multimedia timelines that can be shared and analyzed by students.  This working group will explore tools for building timelines and assignments that leverage timelines.  We’ll look at options this fall, and pilot timeline-based assignments in fall or spring courses.

Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) Response Systems – In-class polling applications like Poll Everywhere or Top Hat use students’ mobile devices (phones, laptops, tablets) to help them engage with content and each other.  A number of such systems are in use around Vanderbilt today.  This working group will help determine if there is a single system that Vanderbilt can support campus-wide, perhaps as early as the spring semester.

Course Blogs – Our third group will focus on the use of blogs in teaching, particularly course blogs in which students write for each other or for the open Web.  The group will consider the use of WordPress as a blogging platform, with the goal of making Vanderbilt’s WordPress platform, my.vanderbilt.edu, a more robust option for instructors by the start of the spring semester.

If you’re interested in participating in any of these working groups, or if you have questions about the groups, please contact CFT Director Derek Bruff, derek.bruff@vanderbilt.edu.