A Day at the TLT

I’m going to take a break from looking at East Asia for the week and blog about something else. Yesterday I got the opportunity to attend the 2010 Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium at Penn State. Earlier this year a group of students, myself included, applied to present at the conference for a class project on digital storytelling and the preservation of stories. To our dismay we did not get accepted, but knowing that there would be a lot of good information about what professors are doing with technology in their classrooms, we decided to go anyway.

Breakfast and check in started at 7:30 and it was a great time to get together with faculty to talk about projects they were doing in their classes, and what we had done in ours. The keynote speaker, Dr. Michael Wesch, talked about how he was using social media in his classroom to get students more engaged in learning. He made a collaborative work environment so that his students would be able to learn all they could from each other and then put it together in a multimedia project.

Then it was off to the sessions.

At 9:45 we went to a session called “Digital Stories as Counter-Texts”. It was a project that used digital media as a platform to address issues with children’s literature and how to re-write them. The student’s project used everything from video to podcasts to make the final product.

At 10:45 we took a break to get some snacks and to talk with Justin Miller about our project and the Media Commons. It was nice to chat about some different techniques in video editing and digital storytelling.

Then it was lunchtime! At 12:15 there was a faculty panel on how social media engages students. The panel also talked about the benefits of using social media and what the students got out of it.

After lunch there were more sessions.

At 1:30 we went to one called “Bringing YouTube Into Angel,” which focused on how to incorporate YouTube onto the Angel site without allowing students to get sidetracked by other links. We went to it so that we could take the information back to some of the professors on our campus and they could use it for their classes.

For the last session at 2:30, we went to the session called “Blogs as e-Portfolio.” We are going to take what was presented here and try to apply some of the concepts to our e-portfolios for this class.

So that was our day at the TLT. We had a lot of fun and got to meet faculty from all over who want to engage students by using media and technology in new ways. I think it was a beneficial experience for us as students, because it showed us that many professors are willing to incorporate new technologies in their classrooms and also that as students we can take these technologies and do more with them.