Teaching With Technology Certificate Hub

If you are completing a portfolio this summer and will gradiuate in the summer term, the suggested date to submit your portfolio to your TWT Coordinator is Fri, July 10. This date will allow the portfolio to be reviewed and finalized before graduation.

If this is your intention, please contact your TWT coordinator.

As always, if you need to submit a portfolio at a later time, please work with your coordinator to set an appropriate date. This is intended to be a flexible program.

A new feature in ANGEL is a "system check" tool which will check to see if you (or your students) are using a recommended browser which accepts cookies and has Javascript enabled.

The tool is to the bottom and the right of the login page at https://cms.psu.edu. If your system is not configured correctly, you will see a red X and information about set up. For some errors, ANGEL may additionally show you a JavaScript error message.

For more information on System Check, please see this knowledgebase article:
http://angelkb.ais.psu.edu/article.asp?article=1609&p=2

A lot of new technology services and upgrades are launched over the summer, so I will post key announcements here as they come out.

The first is that Penn State will be gradually upgrading its Wireless service so that users will have a faster connection and will be able to login without a VPN client. The first hot spot will be "available within portions of University Park's Willard Plaza, Shortledge mall, and east sub-campus areas."

Read more at http://news.its.psu.edu/story-1115 about how to access this service.
Login instructions are at http://wireless.psu.edu/using.html#wireless20

I thought I would wrap up the semester with two ANGEL final tips

Tip #9 is a simple discussion board tip to rotate discussion board maderator duties among your students. If your class relies heavily on discussion, then you can appoint one student each week to take charge of moderate the discussion.

From the Penn State Newswire:

Faculty who include newspaper readership as part of their required coursework can receive a daily subscription of that paper at no cost -- as well online classroom resources, case studies and additional teaching support materials made available by The New York Times and USA Today -- as part of the Penn State Student Newspaper Readership Program.

Read the full story on Live: http://live.psu.edu/story/13726/nw4

The migration to ANGEL 7.3 is scheduled for May 15-18. Service will be unavailable at that time. See http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel/node/370 for more details.

See the ANGEL Community Hub (http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel) for information and descriptions of the latest features including enhanced ANGEL-mail (read messages from all courses in one area), discussion tools, chat tools, roster management and HTML Editor (better support of math equations).

New Features
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/about/news/2009/angel-to-be-upgraded-to-version-7...

From the L-FACULTY-TECHTRAINING@LISTS.PSU.EDU Listserv (open to anyone)
-------------
In addition to “ANGEL as the Hub: Integrating Web-Based Applications into ANGEL,” the following two ANGEL classes have been added to Summer-Fest, a weeklong training event provided by ITS Training Services. To view all available sessions, visit the ITS Training Services online catalog at http://its.psu.edu/training/catalog/ and click on “Summer-Fest” in the black bar at the top of the page.

ANGEL: What’s New in ANGEL 7.3 (via Adobe Connect)
Date: Monday, May 11
Time: 3:00-4:00 p.m.

Links to the completed portfolios submitted in the Spring 2009 semester are now posted on the "Completed Portfolios" page. Congratulations to all the recipients.

Note: One student was added as of Monday morning.

If you need a simple drawing program for illiustrations or concept maps, you may be interested in these two freeware programs.

Dia (Windows Only)
This is a freeware program useful for drawing basic diagrams, and comes with templates for engineering and technical drawings. Files can also be exported to other formats such as PNG and GIF

Download and documentation is at http://live.gnome.org.

Sorry for the delay in posting this entry - even educational technology units get caught up in late spring semester madness.

Another use of the ANGEL Discussion Board is as a Signup sheet that both students and instructors can view. The way it works is that you post a message about the signup and then each reply is a sign up. Here are two possible scenarios.