Teaching With Technology Certificate Hub

These tools are deactivated to ensure server access during a time of heavy testing, dropbox submissions, and gradebook usage occurring during finals week.

Details From the ANGEL Support Team:
ANGEL Import Wizard and Export Wizard tools to be turned off during finals week

In the past few semesters, ITS has been installing technology spaces designed for team based activities.

Spaces include two TeamSpot (201 Pollick) stations in which students can share documents on one large monitor and two Copy Camp spaces (107 Warnock and 102 Wagner) which includes a digital whiteboard on which notes can be saved (additional digital whiteboards are also in Pollock). There are even computers with MIDI keyboards available for collaborative musical scoring.

See http://news.its.psu.edu/story-1142 for details.

Instructors are invited to share innovative uses of technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research at the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. Proposals can be submitted using the online form at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/conference/proposals.

The fall portfolios are officially due to your coordinators next Mon Nov 9. This date allows anyone graduating to complete the porfolio in time for graduation.

Please contact your coordinator if you intend to complete a portfolio. If you need to make alternative arrangements, you can do so with your coordinators.

Just a reminder that I will be presenting two overview sessions of the Teaching with Technology Certificate program on either November 23 from 1:00-2:00 p.m. or November 24 from 9:00-10:00 a.m. in 169 Willard Building, University Park.

To register for the workshop, visit the ITS Training Services Web site at http://its.psu.edu/training/ and select the "Register for training" link.

Don't forget to register for other training sessions during the "Fall Fest".

In the past, I have had more than 6 postings on a technology tool, but this time six was all that was needed. The Blogs platform is fairly simple...once you know the secret quirks.

Is there more you can do with your portfolio? Absolutely...if you are willing to work with some CSS code and HTML, and that can be its own reward.

So, if you want to investigate advanced blog formatting, I would suggest exploring templates (in the Design » Templates menu). Once there, you will be able to access the styles (styles.css) and the different parts of the page (staring with index.html).

Registration is open for the free workshops offered by ITS Training Services that are designed to meet the needs of graduate students at Penn State. Many of these workshops are available over the fall break, including SPSS, Scientific Computing, Refworks, Penn State Thesis Template, and more. Visit the ITS Training Services Web site to register for any of these sessions at http://its.psu.edu/training/ .

I apologize for the delay, but I got swamped with mid-semester work. In any case, I thought I would add some more tips for customizing the portfolio.

1. Hide Welcome Message
You may have noticed that the front page of the portfolio contains a message about a new design. This is a default entry which has been placed in the "Blog" section of your portfolio.

To hide or change this initial message:
1. Login and enter your portfolio/blog.
2. Click Manage in the menu, then Entries
3. You will see a link for "New Design...". Click on the link to edit the entry.

To upload images or links to files onto a page,

1. Open a page editing form (either Create >> Page for a new page or Manage >> Pages for older pages).
2. Click the Insert Image icon (mountain icon) or the Insert File icon (doc icon) in the editing tool bar.
3. For images, follow the procedure on http://blogger.psu.edu/help/upload/images starting at step #3. You will be presented with various formatting and resizing options. Use resizing if the image wider than 400 pixels.