Last August five members of the faculty participated in the Advanced Teaching With Technology Workshop offered by our Information Technology staff. The first picture below shows Amdework Aseffa, Support Technician who directs the College's NEW Mac lab - this VERY state of the art Mac Lab which is designed to support our Fine Arts Department, gives our students the support they need for digital learning and creative work. It is equipped with 15 iMac workstations that include the full Adobe Suite and other popular software. While I have no clue as to most of what happens in this new Lab, I do know that Amde is a a great teacher who strives to make sure that anyone with questions, will get them answered. He, along with Jerome Allen, Erik Lightbody, Sue Breeyear, Kellie Campbell and Jim Millard, helped the five of us from the faculty to, in some cases like me, redesign our classes. The second picture is of a presentation I did this past Friday to explain how I utilize our Tegrity - video-capture program - in both my Sports Psychology course (students making presentations get video-captured and then they have to view their own presentation and write up their own assessment) and in my Theories of Counseling class where students check out a "kit" containing a webcam and a microphone and then they have to - on their own - set up a mock counseling session which they submit to me. THIS has been a huge success and the good folks in IT have been amazingly helpful resources as I try to make my classes even more "technology friendly" than they were. One statistic I was surprised at when we first began the workshop was that the entering first year class at SMC this past August was the FIRST class to have had technology through their ENTIRE school experience. Pretty amazing.
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