Incorporate New Teaching Technologies into your Course Design and Delivery
UConn makes a variety of technological tools available to enhance your teaching, as well as staff resources to help show you how to use them.
Achieve flexibility and enhance student learning outcomes with web-enhanced teaching strategies:
- HuskyCT is UConn’s Blackboard learning management system. Use HuskyCT to electronically send announcements, post content, collect and grade assignments, give quizzes, hold discussions, post grades, and more. Set up a HuskyCT site at the beginning of the semester and use it regularly to share materials—perhaps using the tools described below—with students.
- Collaborate is Blackboard’s web conferencing tool that allows for one-to-many synchronous video-based communication, simulating a virtual classroom. If designed well and aligned with course learning outcomes, it can be used “live” in place of a face-to-face class. In addition, Collaborate integrates fully with HuskyCT and enables instructors to initiate, record, and archive sessions, which they can then incorporate into online course content. It also includes capabilities that simulate a face-to-face class experience, such as breakout rooms, an interactive whiteboard, application sharing, polling, and a hand-raising feature.
Reimagine how, when, and why you lecture: Lecture capture tools make it possible to record and save lectures and make them available digitally. Many faculty successfully use lecture capture to "flip their courses," requiring students to watch modularized recorded lecture material prior to class to free up class time for more engaged learning activities and group discussion
- Mediasite is one of the University’s solutions for lecture capture and streaming. Whether you are teaching online or face to face, reinforcing a difficult topic or making up a missed class, Mediasite can provide an appropriate and effective solution. This tool can be accessed through two recording studios in the Rowe Center for Undergraduate Education or conveniently used from home, making it an excellent choice for offering a virtual lecture in case of a last-minute cancelled class due to weather.
- UConn’s lightboard offers another, more sophisticated form of lecture capture. This new technology allows faculty to integrate PowerPoint while discussing key concepts, illustrate lessons with a diagram, or explain a formula without blocking the written content with their bodies and without turning their backs to their students. UConn’s Lightboard is located at the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning in the Rowe Building.
Contact the Institute for Teaching and Learning to learn more about the instructional technology options available to you, many of which are easy enough to immediately expand your pedagogy and technology toolbox.
Are you feeling overwhelmed by the rapidly expanding body of instructional technologies? Learn how to narrow your options in this week’s 20-Minute Mentor video, which presents some simple guiding principles for choosing technology to use in the classroom. Enter password tech3051 to access the video, which is available this week only (through October 4th).
For more information, contact: the Institute for Teaching and Learning at itl@uconn.edu