Previously Offered Workshops | Educational Technology
The Center for Educational Technology and Curricular Innovation (CETCI) offers free workshops to the Pacific Community on a wide variety of topics concerning teaching with technology. Below is a list of the workshops held since June 2011. Please contact CETCI staff at edtech@pacificu.edu if you would like further information on any of these topics or if you would like to arrange to have one of these workshops presented for your department or unit.
Past Moodle Workshops
Moodle--Beyond the Basics
Go beyond the basics with Moodle! Choose this workshop if you already have Moodle experience and would like to learn how to use some of the more advanced Moodle features. At this hands on workshop, you learn how to more easily manage your courses and add interactive elements through creating conditional activities, using completion tracking, creating badges, and developing grading rubrics.
Creating and Using Groups for Collaborative Work in Moodle
By using groups and groupings in Moodle, you can facilitate small group work in discussion forums, create group assignment submissions, and restrict resources and materials to particular cohorts of students. At this hands-on workshop, we create groups and groupings in Moodle, discuss the different ways in which they can be applied, and develop appropriate assignments and tasks for students. We also go over common use cases for groups and groupings and how they can encourage collaborative work in Moodle.
Tips and Tricks for Moodle
This workshop is dedicated to the "little things" that make your course creation, management, and delivery in Moodle easier. These things include shortcuts for copying and moving content, tips for grading Assignments and Quizzes, ways to make managing the grade book easier, and suggestions for easily improving the visual design of your course homepage. A portion of this workshop is dedicated to troubleshooting your course, so please bring your own Moodle questions and troubles to the table!
Designing an Effective Moodle Course
In this hands-on workshop we introduce instructional design principles to help you determine both the types of activities and content that should be included in your Moodle site as well as how best to structure those materials to facilitate student learning. This workshop is helpful for anyone using Moodle, from those who are teaching fully online courses to those who are using it to supplement their traditional course, and helps you and your students get the most out of the system.
Using Online Discussions and Writing Assignments in Moodle
When used effectively, online discussions and writing assignments not only improve students' overall learning, but they can improve students' in-class performance as well. At this hands-on workshop we explore strategies in which online discussion and writing assignments can be integrated into a course to help students prepare for and engage with in-class discussions, lectures, and collaborative activities. In addition to teaching strategies, we also go over the Moodle tools that make managing online discussions and writing easy.
Online Quizzes and Tests in Moodle
Moodle’s online quizzing and testing tools not only provide a means for faculty to assess their students mastery of course materials, they also offer a number of functions to help students analyze and engage with the subject matter. In this hands-on workshop, we explore how you can use Moodle’s assessment tools to create various quiz and test activities that match the educational goals of your courses.
Moodle Surveys and Polls
Moodle offers several tools that allow you to survey and poll your students. At this hands-on workshop, we go over the different survey and polling tools in Moodle and discussed some strategies for deploying them successfully in your classes.
Moodle Grade Book Workshop
Even for complicated grading schemes, the Moodle grade book can be quickly and easily configured to calculate students' final grades, provide them with running totals, and even automatically assign them a letter grade at the end of the semester. At this hands-on workshop, participants learn how to use Moodle's grade book to organize and calculate all of the course grades as well as how to release the grades to students.
Tour of Moodle 3.0
Join us for a tour of the new version of Moodle! Moodle 3.0 offers some substantial improvements to the system that will make Moodle easier to use and more flexible for faculty and students alike. Some new features include:
- a new streamlined interface to track attendance
- a “sign-up-sheet” where students can add themselves to groups
- a new “drag and drop” question types for quizzes and tests
- general improvements to navigation and the overall look and feel of the site
- And much more!
At this session, we preview the new Moodle and you have a chance to work with some of the updated features.
Past Google Apps Workshops
Introduction to Google Apps for Education
Google Apps for Education allows faculty and students to access popular Google applications, such as Google Docs, Blogger, and YouTube, with their Pacific University accounts. Because these services are connected to University accounts, faculty and students can easily use Google Apps to share materials and collaborate online with other members of the Pacific community. At this workshop, participants are provided with an overview of the Google applications Pacific has access to, an introduction on how to use these applications to collaborate with students and peers, and a review of some of the many educational uses that these tools support.
Teaching with Google Docs and Drive
Pacific’s Google Docs and Drive allows you and your students to easily create collaborative documents, develop surveys and webforms, and share all forms of digital materials. At this hands-on workshop, participants are provided with an overview on how to quickly set up and use the collaborative features in Google Docs as well as how to use Drive to store and share a variety of content. We go over effective teaching strategies for using Google Docs and Drive to support student collaboration and learning inside and outside of the classroom.
Past Teaching Practices and Classroom Technologies Workshops
CETCI Test Kitchen Technology Review: Presentation and Slideshow Tools
Are you bored with PowerPoint and does Prezi make you seasick? There are some new presentation tools out there like Haiku Deck and Flowvella, as well as some oldies like Google Slides, that can put help some life back into your presentations. At this short workshop, we demonstrate some of these presentation tools and let you know when you should and, perhaps more importantly, when you shouldn't, use them to spice up your classes.
Three Great Tools to Help You Create Fantastic Online Videos
Do you want to spice up the videos in your classes? At this workshop, we introduce you to three video tools that will help you quickly and easily make snazzy movies and add interactivity to your videos.
Using Online Video in Your Class
Do you want to start using online video in your classes? It's now easier than ever! At this hands-on workshop, we make our own short movies using freely available online tools and laptop webcams. We then post these videos on YouTube and share them in Moodle. In addition to the mechanics of movie-making, we also go over the academic considerations of using video in class, including the educational uses of video, how to make YouTube vides private, copyright, and protecting student work.
Introduction to E-Portfolios
Are you curious about e-Portfolios? At this hands-on workshop, we show you examples of undergraduate and graduate e-portfolios as well as portfolios created by faculty to showcase their academic achievements. We then show you how you can integrate web-based portfolios into your own courses and careers using Google Sites.
Quick and Easy Classroom Polls with Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere, is, well, a clicker system without clickers that allows you to quickly and easily engage and receive feedback from all of your students during a class session. When you post a question to Poll Everywhere (a super-easy process), students answer using their phone, tablet, laptop, or any other internet-enabled device. The results are then instantly collected, recorded, and displayed in a graph.
At this hands-on workshop, we go over how to set up PollEverywhere and discuss some of the best ways to use it in class to increase student engagement and understanding.
Rethinking PowerPoint Slide Design: Strategies for Slide Design that Improve Student Understanding and Engagement
Research into slide-design suggests that a well-made PowerPoint can not only improve the way students understand what is on the screen, but will also help them gain a better critical understanding of the material being presented. At this workshop, we look at some of the reasons why common slide designs are not only ineffective, but may actually hinder learning. We then go over some straightforward strategies for designing more effective presentations that will improve classroom learning.
Beyond PowerPoint: Making Classroom Presentations Engaging and Interactive
Classroom presentations don't have to be a simple linear procession of one PowerPoint slide after the other. New presentation technologies and interactive web-based tools along with emerging rhetorical strategies open up a host of opportunities to use classroom projectors and screens as a vital and interactive component of the classroom. Through looking at examples of effective digital rhetorical strategies, innovative presentation designs, and investigating new web-based presentation software, we discuss ways in which classroom presentations offer opportunities to increase student participation, interaction, and engagement with the course material and each other.
Is it Time to Flip Your Classroom? Teaching Tips & Technology Tools for You
Have you ever wished that you had more class time to help your students understand difficult concepts? Or, have you ever wished that you had sufficient time to provide an interesting and engaging activity in your class? We can help! At this hands-on workshop, we go over some simple technologies and methods that you can use to move lecture materials online to free up your face-to-face class time. We also discuss some easy strategies that you can use in the classroom in place of lecturing to help your students better understand your course material and to apply key concepts.
Other Workshops
Winter is Coming! Preparing Your Courses for When Classes Can't Meet
Are your courses ready for winter? CETCI can help you prepare your classes so that when winter weather shuts down the campus, you can easily provide your students with meaningful online learning activities. At this hands-on workshop, we provide you with a full set of practical tips, strategies, and technologies so that you will have all the tools you need to quickly set up an effective learning module when severe weather or other unanticipated event prevents your classes from meeting in person.
Teaching with Box
Pacific's new online storage system, Box, has some great features that you can use to help you teach your courses. At this workshop, we go over some of these features and focus on how you can integrate Box with Moodle and our other learning technologies, including:
- Displaying and Embedding Files in Moodle
- Collecting Large File-size Assignments
- Distributing Audio and Video Files
We also go over the differences between Box and Google Drive and discuss when it is best to choose one platform over the other.
Creating Great Banners and Cool Graphics for your Moodle, WordPress, or Google Site
Do you want to make really cool banners and neat graphics for your Moodle, WordPress, or Google Site? At this hands-on workshop, we provide you with the tools and insider secrets to quickly and easily make great graphics that you can use in Moodle, WordPress, or any other website you might be working on. When you are done with this workshop, we guarantee you that your sites will sparkle!