Three meeting were held during the fall semester.

During the first meeting on October 2, 2013 people shared their personal technology experiences with the group. Paul uses the virtual call board in his face to face and hybrid classes.  Amy Haas shared using publisher Power Points to create personalized “virtual lectures for students”.  One useful trick is using the Ctrl + B or W key within a power-point presentation to get a blank screen. Rich suggested placing digital lectures on YouTube so students have access outside of Blackboard.

Other popular tools were scheduling and planning applications.  We also discussed the need for a universal audio/ video player for the classroom to reduce the difficulties and frustrations of getting digital products to “play” in different classrooms on campus.   Another popular hardware tool is a logitech handheld remote clicker that can be used to navigate Power Point presentations in the classroom.

During the second meeting held on October 29th we discussed Doseri, an application that enables an iPad, or iPhone to be used as a remote for a desktop computer.  We were asked to recommend software applications that faculty would find useful because grant money may be available for these items.

The third meeting was held on November 21 . Many people were interested in discussing using blackboard to create quizzes.  Question pools can be used to create unique quizzes for each student. Instructors can control the number of attempts, the order of questions, and the timing feature can be used to discourage “cheating”.