Teaching With Technology Certificate Hub

At the recent Libraries Open House, one of the more popular handouts at the ITS table was how to set up the iPhone to connect to the Penn State network and e-mail. So I thought I would share some resources here:

* iPhone and Wireless 2.0 - http://kb.its.psu.edu/node/1310
* iPhone and VPN/Wireless - http://kb.its.psu.edu/node/1309
* iPhone and Accessing PSU E-Mail - http://kb.its.psu.edu/node/683
Requires activation of IMAP (http://aset.its.psu.edu/accounts/imap.html)

A seldom-advertised service instructors may be interested in are the iStudy modules. These are learning modules for students focusing on sstudy skills such as note taking, time management, text anxiety, brainstorming, oral presentations, team/cooperative learning and even resume writing.

Modules can be imported into any ANGEL course or group and assigned as needed. For more information, see http://istudy.psu.edu/

From ITS Training

ITS Training Services has been made aware of a problem with the lynda.com tutorials. The tutorials fail to run on Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8. Though lynda.com is working to resolve this issue, a timeframe for resolution has not been determined. In the meantime, it is recommended that Windows 7 users run the tutorials on Firefox 3.0 or above, or Safari 2.0 or above. If you have questions about this process, please contact lyndatraining@psu.edu.

Faculty and staff are invited to attend a free Media Commons Tailgate event Saturday, November 13 from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in Foster Auditorium at Pattee Library, University Park. There will be a pre-conference workshop on Friday, November 12, from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.

You probably know Lynda.com includes training for Microsoft Office and Adobe apps, but another Lynda.com also does Web 2.0 as these titles

* Google Docs: Essential Training
* Facebook: Essential Training
* Flickr: Essential Training
* Picassa 3: Essential Training
* Google Apps: Gmail Essential Training
* Twitter: Essential Training

Members of the Penn State community are invited to register for the annual Penn State Teaching with Technology Symposium (http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu). This free event will be held Sat., March 26 2010 at the Penn Stater and includes presentations from Penn State faculty, information about ITS services and a keynote by Clay Shirkey.

The registration form is available at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/register/. If you are interested, please register to reserve a spot as spaces have filled several months ahead of schedule in previous years.

Instructors are invited to submit presentation ideas to the annual Penn State TLT Symposium. This is an annual gathering held in the middle of each Spring semester in which Penn State instructors present their uses of teaching with technology. More details are at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/conference/proposals

The term "multimedia" is often associated with video or photography, but another way to use multimedia in the classroom is to convert a table of figures into some type of chart. Not only is a chart often more "exciting" to look at, but can often show relationships much more clearly than a set of numbers can.

There are actually a variety of tools which can be used to create charts and Lynda.com has information on more than a few of them including:

* Microsoft Excel
Excel 2007 Essential Training (Ch 19)
Excel 2010 Essential Training (Ch 12)
Excel 2008 for Mac Essential Training (Ch 8)

In the continuing series about Lynda.com online tutorials, we will be checking their catalog to see what titles are available and pointers to some useful tools you may not have realized even existed.

First up is Microsoft Word and the Index tool which allows you to automatically generate a table of contents based on section headers in the document. Obviously a major headache saver when you (or your students) are wrapping up a research paper with an immediate deadline. The same tool can also generate an index of the end of a paper.

As some of you may know, each semester we try to examine tips for a different technology tool. This semester, the focus is on the licensed tutorials from Lynda.com (http://its.psu.edu/training/lynda/) available via ITS Training. These are commercial tutorials on a wide range of software packages and technology skills - and they are available for free.

Even if you do not complete the TWT Certificate, you should probably make use of these while you are Penn State. More than one person at ITS use them for refreshers or to learn a new technology.