Descriptions of each of the workshops are provided at the end of the schedule for the day.
Suggested tasks before attending to the technology workshops:
[Maureen and Keith will be on campus on Monday and would be happy to help anyone sign up for the follow accounts, if need be.]
** Seating may be limited at times in the computer labs. It would be helpful if a few of the participants would bring their laptops with them to the workshops just in case another computer or two might be needed. If you use your own laptop, you will need to download Google Chrome onto it prior to the workshops.
**If you are planning to attend the Twitter workshop, you will need to sign up for a Twitter account prior to the workshop. Go to https://twitter.com/. You will NOT need to know how to Tweet prior to the workshop.
**If you are planning to attend any of the sessions about Google Docs, Google Apps or Google+, you will need to activate your JCCC stumail account. To activate your stumail account, login to MyJCCC. In the left hand “Links” column, you will see the link Activate/Reset Stumail/Google Apps Account. Click on this link and follow the instructions.
You will need to sign up for Google+ when your account is activated. You will see a “plus” sign on the upper left hand side of the screen followed by your name. Click on this feature and then follow the directions.
If you already have a gmail account, you can log into that account and also sign up for Google+ by clicking on the “plus” sign in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
**If you are planning to attend the session on WordPress, you will need to ask Educational Technology to set up a WordPress account for you. You can do this by emailing Vince Miller at vmiller4@jccc.edu prior to the workshop. However, if you are uncertain, you can sign up for the account on the day of the workshop. WordPress is used for the publication of the English Blog. It’s very simple to use : – )
Schedule of Workshops
Date: January 9, 2013 (Non-contract Day)
Time: 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. (Includes Lunch)
Location: Regnier Center Computer Labs (RC 234, RC 232, and classroom RC 183)
Title: Digital Technology in English Instruction
Schedule for the Day
Introduction: 9:00 – 9:15 (RC 183)
Vince Miller discusses Google Apps for Education
Simultaneous Sessions: 9:20 – 10:15 (RC 232 and RC 234)
Session 1a: Introduction to Google Docs–Word Processing and Document Sharing (Jim McWard
and Saul Epstein)
Session 1b: Intermediate Google Docs– Collaborative Activity & Classroom Applications (For faculty who already have a working knowledge of Google Docs) (Maureen Fitzpatrick and Vince Miller)
Cookie Break: 10:15 – 10:30 (RC 183)
Simultaneous Sessions: 10:30 – 11:25 (RC 232 and RC 234)
Session 2a: Introduction to Google Apps: Google Drive, Presentations, Spread Sheets, and Cloud storage (Jim McWard and Vince Miller)
Session 2b: Introduction to Twitter (focusing on its use in research) and Twitter Workshop (Saul Epstein and Steve Gerson)
Lunch: 11:30 – 12:30 (RC 183)
Simultaneous Sessions: 12:30 – 1:15 (RC 232 and RC 234)
Session 3a: Introduction to Google Sites (webpage design and portfolios) (Maureen Fitzpatrick and Vince Miller)
Session 3b: Using Updated Turnitin and PeerMark (Jim McWard and Saul Epstein)
Soft Drinks and Coffee Break: 1:15 – 1:30 (RC 183)
Simultaneous Sessions: 1:30 – 2:30 (RC 232 and RC 234)
Session 4a: Workshop with Google+ and YouTube (social media on Google, video chat, video assignments for students) (Vince Miller and Jim McWard)
Session 4b: Introduction to WordPress for Creating Website Homepages and Blogs (Keith Geekie and Saul Epstein)
Technology Planning Committee: Vince Miller, Steve Gerson, Jim McWard, Maureen Fitzpatrick, and Keith Geekie. Please contact any of the committee members for more information.
Google Docs is a free, cloud-based tool that allows your students to read, write, and collaborate online from any device. Google Drive is simply the container which holds your Google Docs, the way a hard drive contains files. All students and faculty receive 5 GB of free upload storage with their Stumail Google accounts using Google Drive, and unlimited storage when using the native Google Docs format, which is most of the time. Students never need to worry about having Microsoft Office or other applications installed on their computer. They just need a browser and a connection to the internet.
Students can also benefit from features such as simultaneous viewers/editors in a single document, document comments, and synchronous online chat. Faculty and students can share documents with each other, or with all JCCC accounts, or with the world. Users can also receive notifications when a document is changed, see a document’s revision history, or even roll back to a previous version of a document. Users can create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, forms, and drawings. Google Docs using Stumail accounts gives you the security that your students have authenticated to this tool using their JCCC account, so you do not have to guess at their personal usernames. Any future learning management system we choose will have strong Google Docs integration, so now is the time to start using this tool for your classes.
Here’s some info on Twitter, hashtags, and secondary research: Learn how to use hashtags and crowdsourcing to leverage the Twitter stream. Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates. These messages are called tweets. Each tweet is a text-based post of up to 140 characters in length. Twitter is a free service that lets you subscribe to, share, or follow as many twitter messages as you like. One interesting feature of Twitter is hashtags, community-driven metadata, which can be used by you and students to provide secondary content for research projects. By clicking on a hashtagged (#) word in a tweet, you can access other tweets in that category or topic. You can also access http://search.twitter.com/. Enter the hashtag #quotes or #quote and a keyword to find pertinent quotes. Following hashtagged words lets you research trending topics and get immediate feedback on what people are thinking internationally.
Google Sites is a free, cloud-based application with collaborative features that is easily learned and highly usable in your courses. With your activated Google Apps account, you can create a site, add pages, and be editing text in minutes: no teaching HTML or fretting over file management. Use Google Sites to publish exceptional student work, to design spaces for collaborative projects that can highlight individual as well as group work, or to create research or evaluative assignments that link directly to their sources (even if the source is a video clip, a sound file or picture). Security settings allow students and instructors alike to develop secure electronic or teaching portfolios that can accessed only with the permission of the creator. The possibilities are as endless as the internet itself.
The name Turnitin may be synonymous with “plagiarism checker” for both students and teachers, but the software can do much more than simply identify copy-and-paste papers. With Turnitin, students can use PeerMark to read and review each other’s rough drafts. The GradeMark feature can save grading time with standard QuickMark grammar and punctuation notations. In addition, teachers can create rubrics and their own custom comments to use when evaluating student work. If instructors use Turnitin with all papers during a semester, it’s easy to track class and student improvement with “Class Stats.” Turnitin regularly adds new features to its software. For example, last spring, GradeMark added a new voice tool, allowing instructors to record a verbal comment for each student when grading. This session will focus primarily on the PeerMark and GradeMark tools, and if you have an Angel course shell ready to go, you’ll be able to add a Turnitin drop box for your first paper assignment of the spring semester.
In the session on WordPress for Beginners, learn how to set up a personal/professional website using WordPress, the software and server space available to all faculty at JCCC. The session will focus on the WordPress software itself, including design choices, homepage and page creation, and graphics. Most of the session will be devoted to a workshop in order for you to get your websites/blogs up and running. If you want to attend this session, it is advisable for you to email Vince Miller in advance so that he can set up the web address for your site on the WordPress server. He can be reached at vmiller4@jccc.edu. However, such notification is not essential for you to attend the workshop.