Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Software for HCC Faculty

HCC has software that faculty can use! Go to CITT's website to see what is available. From CITT's home page, Software is listed under Tools.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Place the CITT Blog Feed on Your Homepage!

The CITT blog can now be added to your personalized Google, netvibes, newsgator and Yahoo page, or Atom account. Click the Feed button (top of the right hand column) and select the site to which you would like to add the feed. Follow the instructions on the page that pops up to finish setting up the feed.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Online@HCC Planned Outage 12/28/10

As part of Blackboard Managed Hosting team's initiative to improve our environment and take advantage of new technologies, they will be undergoing a project to swap out their existing core switches in both the VA2 and VA3 data centers. This swap will enable them to upgrade to their vendor's latest technology switches while expanding their capacity so that they can better support our growth.

The maintenance work is scheduled to happen on Tuesday December 28th from 12:00 - 8:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST).

Why is the maintenance window 8½ hours instead of the usual 4 hours?
This project is larger in scale than most of the maintenance work Blackboard Managed Hosting does during their regular windows. Their standard maintenance generally requires adding or replacing a card or upgrading code whereas this maintenance requires the replacement of both the A & B side switches. While the work itself should not take the full 8½ hours, they have built a buffer into the window to resolve any problems that might arise and/or enact a rollback plan if needed.

Will Online@HCC be offline the entire window?
The Managed Hosting Engineering Teams will take all necessary steps to minimize the impact to our site. However, because the maintenance requires redirecting traffic in addition to physically removing equipment, HCC faculty and students may experience extended periods of latency and/or packet loss at anytime during the entire window. My recommendation is to prepare for the site to be offline for the full eight and a half hours. You may find the site available sporadically but you should not plan to do any work as it may not be saved if the site becomes unreachable.

In other words, please do not log in and do any work on your classes as the work may not be saved.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Faculty Interest Groups (FIGS) are Now Forming!

Faculty Interest Groups (FIGS) at Hillsborough Community College are groups of faculty that have a mutual interest in a specific aspect of teaching and learning. These groups have an anticipated goal to foster teaching and to develop pedagogical advances in the teaching field. FIGS offer opportunity to all faculty members - adjuncts, non-tenured, and tenured that have common interests in a specific subject.

Members of FIGS have the opportunity to gather and share best practices, do research about their subject, support each other in the application of their methodology, and provide peer evaluation of their relevance with student learning.

Visit the FIGS Website for information on creating and/or participating in a FIG.

Are you currently involved in a FIG or have an idea for a FIG? Comment on this post to share!

Faculty Spotlight - Ed Ericsson

Radio and Television Production
Teaching Radio and Television Production requires the use of technology. The application of that technology requires the ability to perform under pressure. Stressing performance and creativity along with the technical knowledge and operation of production equipment keeps the students working both of their brain hemispheres. I usually start my Introduction to Broadcasting students with PowerPoint. It is the easiest way to make a stand alone audio/visual project. They move to basic Electronic Field Production and iMovie. As they progress through the curriculum they gradually work up to FinalCutPro and Adobe Premiere.

Hawk Radio is the perfect learning environment for budding Disc Jockeys. The beginners start out broadcasting on the internet, a place where as we know amateur broadcasts are commonplace, and work toward having a show on 1520 AM between 8 AM and 2 PM Monday through Friday. In the radio class we use Audacity because it is free and easy to use. There is also a tutorial link on Hawknet. I often use videos from the websites Expert Village and How Stuff Works. I test my Careers in Film and Video with a Webquest. I use one-on-one assessment to check the ability of students to operate the equipment and creative projects to stretch their minds. Another great free tool for writing and creating a variety of projects is Celtx.

Ed Ericsson is the Program Manager for Digital Television and Media Production at the Ybor City Campus.


Faculty Spotlight is an excellent way to share what you are doing with the HCC Community. It is also a great opportunity to recruit coworkers, collaborate and exchange ideas. Interested in being our next Faculty Spotlight? Contact us at cittfacdev@hccfl.edu.