2011 ACAT Instructional Technology Innovation Fund recipients and their projects

Mark Husbands (Religion) Digital Note Taking & Lecture Capture Project
with “Pear Note” -- a license for software to facilitate in-class student notetaking. Check out a description of the proposed project here.
Tom Ludwig (Psychology) Tools for Efficient Delivery of Online Instruction -- hardware to facilitate the development of instructional modules. Instructors planning blended courses or adding online content to standard classroom courses need efficient ways to develop online instructional materials and to deliver them to students in formats that can be viewed on laptop computers and on mobile devices such as smartphones. Although the technology is already available to deliver simple content tutorials through narrated PowerPoint/Keynote presentations or QuickTime movies, it's not easy to make this type of content interactive in the sense of assessing student learning within the tutorials themselves. This project will produce a set of software tools that Hope faculty could use to create interactive instructional tutorials with embedded quizzes. These tutorials could contain text paragraphs, photos, graphs, animations, and video clips. Once the faculty member had assembled the media elements for a tutorial, the tutorial could be created in a text editor, using simple "mark-up" tags to specify the content to be displayed on each tutorial page.The software tools would read the text file and generate an interactive tutorial that could be displayed within the Flash player on laptop computers and some smart phones, or be displayed using HTML5 technologies on iPhones and iPads.
Becky Schmidt (Kinesiology) Tablet Technology in Health Dynamics -- tablet devices to facilitate faculty-student contact in a blended version of Kinesiology 140. In this new model, the bulk of student personal contact will take place during physical activity periods. I and my two TAs will circulate around the cardio room, the weight room, and the track area of the Dow Center giving encouragement and advice, and we will initiate discussion around issues arising out of the online materials. As we maintain contact with students during their activities, we will need to be able to access their records in order to monitor and discuss their progress, and keep a record of personal contact, including notes and observations. In order to do this we will need fast, efficient, and ready access to their data. Handheld tablet devices connected to Moodle via the campus wi-fi network may accomplish this.
Leigh Sears (Kinesiology) Attendance System for Health Dynamics -- a card swipe system for health dynamics class attendance. With multiple sections of health dynamics each semester, each containing roughly 60 students - much time is wasted in the sign in and sign out process. There is limited time to work out and some of this time is wasted standing in line to sign into class and time has to be set aside at the end to check everyone out. Class time could be more effective if the students simply had to swipe a card on their way into the workout facility. Also - this would ensure that students are not signing in or out for each other.