For the past five years, I have served on the Focus on Teaching and Technology Planning Committee. FTTC is a regional conference that provides a combination of keynote addresses, faculty innovations during concurrent sessions, technology workshops, and vendor exhibits. The conference program has evolved over the years to reflect emerging trends in technology applications in higher education and shared expertise in online teaching experiences and strategies.
This year, I was lucky enough to have two presentations on the program. The first was titled Matching Method to Media: Building the Bridge Between Technology and Pedagogy. The entire Learning Design Team at Maryville University participated in this presentation, which addressed the overwhelming nature of selecting technology for teaching and learning. We addressed how quickly media changes and the plethora of choices available, and briefly highlighted the challenges educators face in the field today. We provided a five-step process and a list of guiding questions to use when selecting technology, and walked through examples from our work at Maryville University.
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| The Learning Design Team: Angie Hampel, Melissa Childers, Tom James, Shanna Seyer, Michelle Ehlert, and Janet Roberts |
The second presentation was titled Using PowerPoint and the Internet to Develop Engaging Course Materials. I partnered with Amy Quarton from Maryville University to talk through innovative ways to use an old tool–Microsoft PowerPoint. PowerPoint has long been used to develop educational materials, and it has enormous capabilities when combined with the Internet’s endless supply of information and graphics. Together, these technologies allow us to design materials that engage the learner and enhance the learning experience. We demonstrated new, innovative ways of using these familiar technologies to make asynchronous learning materials for any subject.
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| Posing with Amy Quarton after “Using PowerPoint and the Internet to Develop Engaging Course Materials” |
