eLCC 2011 Rocks!

Vinnie and Nicole

My first eLCC conference was an impressive experience. Every session attended over the three days offered takeaways that can be immediately applied to the RHCHP workplace. Kudos to the conference planning committee and all others that made this such a worthwhile experience.

Now, on to the good stuff. Two of the most enjoyable experiences were a couple of hands-on sessions. The first was one facilitated by Kathy Keairns, a senior instructional designer at the University of Denver (is it DU or UD?) titled Leveraging Web 2.0 Tools to Support Teaching. Kathy emphasized a number of technologies that are free to use and mostly cloud-based. One of these was Picnik (www.picnik.com) for basic photo editing. Picnik is web-based, free and very easy to use. She cautioned that it can be buggy when using IE and works best with Firefox. Also demoed were Voki (tinyurl.com/6xrez4d) for creating animated avatars, and Viddler (viddler.com) for recording, downloading and uploading video creations. The session was highly interactive, resulting in a number of other recommended technologies such as Irfanview (www.irfanview.com) image viewer/editor, Xtranormal for movie making, and Voicethread (http://voicethread.com) for creating multimedia learning experiences. All are free with very shallow learning curves.

Yvonne, Sally and friend

The other hands-on was facilitated by Apple and provided experience with the iPod Touch. This was my first experience with the Touch and I was fascinated! Each participant was handed an iPod Touch preloaded with several education-based apps. Selected apps were then explored with ideas on their use in the classroom.

One of the most enjoyable sessions was provided by Lisa Marie Johnson and Karen Kaemmerling of CCCOnline. They presented the session Open Content for Professional Development, examining the incredible number of courses available to faculty on effective learning strategies. It was continually emphasized that all trainings were available free of charge to anyone interested. This will be a valuable resource for RHCHP as we begin our move to Desire2Learn.

Barry Dahl's luncheon keynote

Another session eye-opener that offered tremendous future potential was Jonathan Sherrill's talk on analytics and their use with D2L. Jonathan is a data analyst with CCCOnline and described several analytics tools available in D2L. He then took the presentation a step further by reviewing several 3rd party tools, all online and all free or low cost, that provide an even greater degree of granularity in the analysis of student course data. Absolutely fascinating and something I'm anxious to explore after our D2L implementation.

Barry Dahl's lunch keynote integrated clickers with the topic of technology adoption. The clickers were used to gather demographic data which was then compared with responses to several opinion questions. Barry weaved the results into an interesting comparison of attitudes towards learning technologies and social networks.