Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

First year seminar classes are inherently a difficult type of course to plan for. Some of our enterprising colleges at Penn State have decided to implement collaborative technologies in their seminar classes. Check out this Symposium 2008 podcast to hear about their experiences. As always, have a look at the session notes and enjoy!

Ritzko and Maxwell:
Student teams interviewed key campus personnel by various means including audio, e-mail, polycom, face-to-face, and text chat. Students learned to use more formal, professional communication. They presented what they learned in a PowerPoint. She gave little PPT guidance, so they varied in effectiveness. May provide more guidance in the future. She gave one grade to each team; because it was obvious some team members didn't do much work, she will also rethink that grading policy. She would like to include more peer evaluations in the future.

Striedieck:
Used a wiki as a teaching/learning tool for the first time. She assumed students would be very familiar with wikis, but they were not. Used PBwiki (easy as making a PBJ sandwich.) Pairs of students served as wiki patrol for a particular week, not just description but interpretation and reflection.