Instructional Technologies and Teaching

What research tells us about learning and how that can and should be used to guide the design and use of educational technology. This was the Keynote session from the 2008 Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology Conference (COLTT).

Technological skills and understanding how to employ Web 2.0 tools to successfully support pedagogy are vital for foreign language faculty today.

The effective use of games in academia requires a critical approach to the medium and a willingness to let go of the learning process and harness its outcomes.

This session will demonstrate how a redesign in overhead slides can create presentations that foster a more learner-centric rather than teacher-centric model. A change in emphasis from verbal to visual promotes active learning and increases comprehension, encourages deductive reasoning, and improves retention.

How can we bring authentic learning, with real-world outcomes and assessments, into the history/social science classroom? This session will discuss the presenter's efforts to design and teach digital history seminars in partnership with museum professionals at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Monticello.

PrimaryAccess (www.primaryaccess.org) www.primaryaccess.org is a Web 2.0 digital tool developed at the University of Virginia's Center for Technology and Teacher Education that allows teachers to integrate primary source documents into the curriculum through student-created digital documentaries. This session will demonstrate the tool and discuss its use in the K–12 classroom to stimulate participant ideas for transferability to higher education.

Current theories suggest that learning is facilitated when embedded in the context in which it will be used, but the constraints of the traditional classroom make implementing this difficult to impossible. This session will focus on exploring how new technologies such as virtual environments can situate learning in a "real" virtual context, motivate students while helping them develop scientific habits of mind, and support teachers in leading complex scientific inquiries.

The use of blogging in education has become a hot topic. This presentation will demonstrate how blogging was used as a learning tool in an online literature course and discuss how the use of blogging supports current online learning theories.

Digital information technologies have profound implications for education and force us to rethink how we teach, what we teach, and who we think we are teaching. Understanding these implications and rethinking education will help us prepare our students to build a more human future in an increasingly digital environment.

Applying Technology to Teaching and Learning is a set of guides to help you select and integrate technology into teaching and learning. Whether you are a faculty member, academic administrator, instructional technologist, or part of a planning committee you may find them useful to:

• Focus on the key learning issues that should drive technology selection
• Better understand your technology options
• Implement the technology that best supports your teaching and learning objectives