HCC's STEM Grant - Published!

Bethany Cordell and Walt Justice, of HCC's Title III Stem Grant have been published. You can purchase their book, Title III (HSI) STEM Grant Technology Manual, in the Apple App Store.

Download the book from the Apple App Store today: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/title-iii-hsi-stem-grant-technology/id659027749?mt=11

HCC at NISOD Conference

Recently, some HCC faculty and staff went to the NISOD Conference in Houston, TX.

Travis Meek presented at the conference. "It was a great experience to be honored with the Excellence award at NISOD. The honor was intensified from being able to share it with HCC colleagues and a fellow Excellence award winner Mike Rabaut. Austin was an exciting city filled with music all around and bats flying overhead. To be honest the conference started off a bit slow for me because of so low attendance at sessions including the one I presented. By Wednesday it had all turned around with some innovative presentations on ideas I plan to implement in my own courses in varying amounts, such as flipped classrooms and collaborative testing." - Travis Meek



Mike Rabaut was HCC's NISOD Award Winner. "I found the experience interesting and was honored to receive the award especially with my school mate Travis Meek, a fellow Excellence award winner. The conference was enlightening and full of pleasant surprises, and of course there were the night time activities. I would like to extend my thanks to Dana Livesay and the CITT group for their hard work and dedication to helping faculty with their technology needs as well as allowing me to attend the conference. I especially enjoyed the evening dinner and accompanying Jam session that was punctuated with the talents of the attendees." - Mike Rabaut



HCC had a table at the conference:



Mike Rabaut and Dana Livesay:



Mike Rabaut and Travis Meek:

Etruscan Metalworking Project: SUCCESS!

This past year, professor Travis Meek embarked on an Etruscan metalworking project with his Honors Humanities class. The students carved votive figures, built a furnace and casted and bronzed their figures. Click here to read the entire story.

Professor Meek and his Honors Humanities Class


Bronzed Figure

Faculty Spotlight - Suzanne Campbell Crosby

Art Instructor, Program Manager
Ybor Campus

http://www.suzannecampcrosby.com/

“Most students say that they have learned to “see” and have become visually super aware of the wonderful visual things that go on all around us every day without notice. ”

Capital Course:
I like working with the more advanced students because they have usually begun working with their own visual signature; however, I would probably teach only photography I (if I could only choose one class).  The students in Photography I grow so rapidly,  and it is very enriching to see these students become “visually aware”. Sometimes taking this course changes their life in some major or minor way, and that is always a joy to a faculty member.

Ideal Ideology:
I expect a great deal from the students, and they get back a great deal from me. My attitude is that you get the most from any class if you really throw yourself into it fully. I am not easy, the course work is not easy, but it is very satisfying and rewarding when you successfully make a great photograph.

Teachable Moment:
When the students have their first day in the darkroom, it is magic. If you love that experience, you will always love being in the darkroom; if not, you may only enjoy taking pictures and not darkroom work….it is very demanding.

Student Success:
Stay up-to-date with the assignments and don’t get behind. Shoot lots of film so that you will have many choices and selections for the projects. The more you shoot and print the better you get; there is no easy or quick “fix”.

Techno Tool:
All art classes are visual experiences; therefore, I continually show the work of photographers who will hopefully stimulate imagination and creativity. I also show good examples of excellent student work done by their peer group. I encourage students to use technology to look up photographers and techniques that interest them personally. I require the students to attend at least three photography related events during the semester and write about what they have seen. I stress being able to verbally discuss their own photography as well as the work of others.

Optimized Advice:
Show your passion for the subject that you teach; demand excellence and encourage taking risks in creativity and imagination.

Blackboard Learn Upgrade

We will updating to the latest version of Blackboard Learn, Service Packs 10 & 11, beginning on May 9th at 10:00pm Eastern through May 11th at Noon. These updates will provide a more user friendly and modern experience for you as a daily user of the system. Feel confident that the updates to Blackboard Learn were done with educators and students in mind. Nearly 640 institutions, including ones like HCC, as well as over 600 educators and nearly 600 students contributed to the development of this latest release of Blackboard.

Several existing features have been improved and some exciting new features added to make your day more efficient. Here is an overview of tools that you can expect to be using soon:

• New Content Editor: The new Content Editor vastly improves the user experience for formatting text, pasting content from Microsoft Word, and adding content to all areas of Learn. Blackboard has also replaced the old math editor with a new mathML equation editor.
• Assessment Item Analysis: Now you can easily refine your assessments by evaluating the quality of each question and that question’s ability to discriminate between students who understand the material and those who do not. Ineffective questions can easily be identified and then quickly corrected with the Automatic Regrade feature.
• My Blackboard: This feature introduces a new, modern user experience in Blackboard Learn that consolidates critical information from all your Courses and Organizations as well as your school-wide academic network. The new tools in My Blackboard – Profile, Posts, Updates, My Grades, and People – were developed to meet the needs of today’s active learner and enhance student engagement. My Blackboard allows you to easily monitor activity across your courses. You can be confident that your students are up-to-date and engaged in the online learning experience.
• New Global Navigation Menu: Always present in the top right corner, the new navigation menu is the entry point to My Blackboard and also provides one-click access to your Courses, Settings, and Blackboard Help. Additionally, the new menu will tell you how many items in My Blackboard are new or need your attention, so you never miss a thing.

Resources to Help

To ensure you can familiarize yourself with these new features of Blackboard Learn and be ready to integrate them in your instruction. Here are a few valuable resources that you may be interested in reviewing which are offered by Blackboard and CITT:

• CITT Resources – a set of resources from Blackboard and CITT
• Quick Hit Videos – a set of videos on YouTube that introduce all the new features
• On-Demand Learning Center – free access to video tutorials and getting started guides.
• Feature Showcase – review all of the new features.
• Guided Trial – experience a pre-populated course in Blackboard Learn. Check out the latest features as well as tips and tricks for grading and student collaboration.
• Help.Blackboard.com – assistance using the new Blackboard Learn platform, organized by role.
• Educator Cohort – series of online meetings to familiarize educators with new features

Universal Design Module

The Florida Consortium on Postsecondary Education and Intellectual Disabilities has created a module on Universal Design for Online Learning. The module is five sections and takes about two hours to review.

From the module's webpage:

• Section 1: Introduction to UDL provides the history of UDL, its relevance to what we know about variability in learning, and the principles that comprise the UDL framework. Four sections addressing the interrelated components of the UDL curriculum follow the introduction.
• Section 2:Network-Based Goals provides guidance of how to structure a learning activity such as a lecture, presentation, laboratory experiment, or an assessment by identifying its true purpose and how to effectively communicate goals to students.
• Section 3:Methods presents flexible strategies to support student learning.
• Section 4:Materials guides you in the selection of flexible media and materials that support a variety of pathways to meet specific learning expectations.
• Section 5:Assessing Students offers considerations for designing assessments that accurately measure student knowledge, skills and engagement by maintaining construct relevance and reducing irrelevant or distracting elements that interfere with the assessment’s validity.

Click Universal Design for Online Learning to view the the module.

Professional Development On-Demand?

HCC now has Go2Knowledge! Go2Knowledge is an on-demand professional development system that offers over 75 webinars. Certificates are issued upon the completion of each webinar.

Training topics include:

• At-Risk Populations
• Campus Safety
• Organizational Development
• Student Success
• Teaching & Learning
• Technology

There is also an area of Open Educational Resources. These are links to educational materials that are routinely used by educators worldwide.

Contact CITT for access instructions.