Teaching With Technology Certificate Hub

Faculty are invited to submit proposals for talks at the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology on April 18. This year's theme is "Student Engagement and the Culture of Teaching and Learning." As part of this year's theme we are looking for presentations that highlight the student's involvement in the learning process.

Learn more at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/content/call-proposals-share-your-work-2009-tlt-symposium-april-18

Master Slide

The Master Slide area (usually under the View menu) is where you can set the default formatting options for every slide in your presentation. If you want to white blue text instead of red text or square bullets intead of circle bullets, you can change them once in the master slide, and it will change all the slides at once - a real time saver.

If you're in an especially creative mood, you can also insert images for a header, change the footer and modify the background image.

If you want to learn the latest at what's happening at the Digital Commons (http://digitalcommons.psu.edu/) and get some multimedia tips, you might want to click the "Discussion Forums" link at the top to see the list of available forums.

Two general information forums are "New Technologies" and "General Info" (News and Tips).

A common cliche about PowerPoint is that all presenters do is read a list of bullet points off of each slide. Fortunately, it is possible to avoid this cliche by reorganizing slides to minimize bullet points. You might even think of ways of using PowerPoint slides to generate student interaction.

Some common tips (in a bullet list).

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=yeQ3_2f6S8zlD_2be_2f4fpnPs9w_3d_3d

Please answer a brief set of questions regarding the technology training topics, format, and time frames that best meet your technology learning needs. ITS Training Services will take your feedback into thoughtful consideration in our continual efforts to design and deliver the most appropriate technology training opportunities for Penn State’s graduate students.

At the end of the survey, you may enter to win a training session valued at up to $50.

Please respond by October 31.

Most experts agree that the key to a good presentation is a good overall structure. One way to conceptualize structure is to develop an outline. You can even import a Word outline into PowerPoint.

Some questions that may be helpful:

If you're getting frustrated with how much work each PowerPoint file is taking, you may want to consider taking a course (even if it's a refresher). As with many complex software products, there are lots of hidden tricks and tools that you may not be aware of...until you see them in a demo.

Some Penn State Options are
* http://its.psu.edu/training/resources/handouts/index.html#office (ITS Training Catalog)
* http://its.psu.edu/training/resources/handouts/index.html#office (Handouts)
* http://www.ecs.psu.edu/training/Software_Tips/PowerPoint.htm (Random Tips, Engineering)

If you are interested in learning about advanced Web technologies such as Java, Solaris, XML and Perl, you can take authorize tutorials from the Sun Learning Center for free.

Training for StarOffice is also available.

Read more at http://its.psu.edu/training/sun/index.html

The release of the new Blog software (Movable Type 4.2) at Penn State includes updated portfolio templates. If you want a WYSIWYG template or want to combine a portfolio and a blog, check out the Penn State Portfolio page for more details

http://portfolio.psu.edu/blogbuild