In 2005, Guertin began to record her classroom lectures in MP3 format. She makes them available to students via iTunes U , allowing them to engage in course content outside class.

Additionally, she recorded review sessions consisting of questions to help students prepare for exams. She asked them to listen to each question, pause, and try to answer it. Guertin explained, “These were fundamental questions to make sure they understood the basics, then during the test, I asked synthesis-type questions.” She said these recorded reviews are beneficial because Brandywine is a commuter campus and it is difficult to get the class together for face-to-face review. “This way,” Guertin said, “all the students had access to it.”

Now that Brandywine has a Digital Commons studio, Guertin assigns projects that ask the students to be the creators of podcasts and other digital media.

As one project in her Environment Earth course, students created an audio tour of tree species marked on a trail at Ridley Creek State Park. Each student recorded a podcast about a species, then added photos to it. Guertin said her students worked hard to create high-quality work. She observed, “They were not happy turning in something that wasn’t to their satisfaction. I think it’s because the projects they did are being viewed by an outside audience. I saw a sense of pride and professionalism in a way that I wouldn’t have gotten if I just had them write a paper. Their voice had this inflection to it because they were excited to talk about the tree. I don’t think I would have gotten as good a result in terms of the quality of the science, either.”

In October, her students visited the Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C., a competition for energy-efficient home design. Carrying cameras and iPods with microphones, the students viewed the model homes, recorded observations, and interviewed attendees. From this, they created a virtual tour of the event, which was tied into Google Earth, an application that allows users to view a satellite image of a location. “What we’ve created can be shared throughout the Penn State community,” she said.

Guertin’s students entered the SCA/Mazda Conservation in Action Multimedia Contest, which asks young people to pick an environmental issue, describe it, and come up with a solution. The entry could be in the form of a podcast, movie, or song. She said her students chose a range of topics and technologies and that she was thrilled with the creativity of their work.

She said she was struck when a student commented, “I didn’t realize I cared about this subject. Now I realize I can do something about it.” Guertin explained, “That ‘do something’ means the technology is there for them to help communicate what they’ve learned. They cared about the science and what got them into the science was learning not just that you need technology to take measurements in the field, but also that it can help communicate the science.”

Mashing it up at a Big University

While most of our faculty and students don’t realize they are creating mashups, some amazing things are happening on our campus. Here at Penn State University we’ve worked very hard to create flexible platforms to support faculty and students’ use of emerging technologies for teaching and learning. What we are starting to see is amazing to us. During this session we will highlight examples of faculty and student mashups from PSU — some of which are directly supported by our Education Technology Services group and some that are just showing up. We will cover the PSU Platform for Digital Expression that is empowering faculty innovation, discuss issues facing implementing mashups at a large university, show real examples that are emerging on campus, and discuss how we facilitate effective creative use by both teachers and learners.

From the Symposium’s website:

The NMC Symposium on Mashups will itself be a mashup of venues, with sessions taking place in the 2D web environment of Adobe Connect, with support by LearningTimes and selected activities in the 3D world of the NMC Conference Center in Second Life (all Second Life events will be streamed back into the Connect environment).

At the conclusion of the session we will post a PDF of the slides here.