BuzzLion for the Week of April 13

Posted on April 18, 2008 
Filed Under BuzzLion, Uncategorized

It is très printemps and vive l’amour here in what is currently not just Happy Valley but Very Happy Valley, as spring has you-betcha-sprung. While the sun shines, we here in ETS continue to work hard and demonstrate that flowers are not the only things blooming around here. Ideas are busting out all over.

Audrey Romano ETS web designer, recently posted some very nice screensaver ads for collaborative learning spaces. These ads will go on student lab computers. What exactly are collaborative learning spaces? Take a listen to this podcast and find out.

Elizabeth Pyatt, ETS instructional designer, is an example of the many multi-faceted experts we have working at ETS. She has posted in her blog about instructional design, linguistics, and now about Web design. She has discovered an effective way to partner a more “Web 1.0″ content management system, Dreamweaver, with the Web 2.0 open source content management system, Drupal, to create accessible Web sites.

Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, discovered something recently that is pretty astounding. You probably have heard of virtual worlds. Maybe even heard of Second Life. But, did you know there are now more than 100 virtual worlds that are designed for young people? Brett offers a link to a report on this and makes a bit of a challenge.

Chris Stubbs, ETS programmer, never fails to find interesting technology items to post about in his blog. His latest interesting discovery has to do with blogs and Facebook. In fact, how you can blog via Facebook. Take a look and learn how.

And now, here is some news of interest……

New issue of ANGEL Shorts focuses on Action Editor

ANGEL Shorts are one-page documents covering a specific point of interest in Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL. They cover the five most essential things a person needs to know about the topic in order to get the most from its use. The aim is to help faculty, staff, and students maximize the value of using ANGEL as a teaching tool. The latest issue of ANGEL Shorts focuses on “Five Things Faculty Should Know about the Action Editor.” This issue, as well as all previous issues of ANGEL Shorts, is available as a downloadable PDF file on the ANGEL Community Hub at http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel/.

Registration for Summer-Fest technology training opens April 21

Beginning Monday, April 21 at 9:00 a.m., faculty and teaching assistants are invited to sign up for free technology workshops during Summer-Fest 2008, a weeklong training session conveniently offered during the break in the academic schedule, May 12-16. Popular topics include Using Clickers in the Classroom, EndNote, e-Portfolio, Videoconferencing for Instruction, Excel, SPSS, Office 2007, Penn State Thesis Template, Photoshop, Using Adobe Connect in the Classroom, and many more. Please visit the online catalog for a complete list of training sessions, and log in to register for training at http://its.psu.edu/training/.

That’s it for this week’s edition of the BuzzLion. We would like to hear from YOU. So, you can either email BuzzLion at jco11@psu.edu or just comment on this blog posting.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy this Very Happy Valley spring on this Blue-White Weekend.

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