Preconference Workshops
Developing and Sustaining Second Life Projects Emotional and Multiple Intelligences in the Virtual Classroom SoftChalk Lesson Builder meets Quality Matters Standards for Online Courses
Developing and Sustainting Second Life Projects
Presented by: Sunay Palsole and Saul Gutierrez – UT El Paso; Jessica Sanchez – UT Pan American
Date: Wednesday, May 26, 2010 from 9am-12pm
Location: Omni Austin Hotel
Fee: $25 (This workshop is limited to 20 participants.)
Requirements: Preconference workshops are open to conference registrants only. Each participant must bring a wireless-capable laptop, and have access to their institution’s island in Second Life.
Audience Level: Advanced Beginner/Intermediate
Description: Second Life has shown a great potential as a tool to engage students in new immersive activities and to build social presence which can help reduce collaborative barriers in online settings. Second Life can be used in a variety of settings ranging from use as a tool for engaging students in office hours to holding online classrooms to 
immersive labs where students are immersed in experiential environments designed to generate deeper learning. Along with the promise and potential of this new tool comes the burden of planning, designing, building and sustaining such projects. As with any instructional technology adoption, the tool must be appropriate to the learning outcome desired and because of the learning curve involved with Second Life; the learning activities must be even more carefully designed and assessed so the learners experience the value of the learning. Our experience with using Second Life has shown that activities in Second Life must be explicitly tagged to course goals and they must be made transparent before the adoption of projects. When these activities are not carefully designed, there is a high degree of student frustration and a resulting drop in end of semester evaluations. However all these issues can easily be mitigated by understanding the possibilities AND limitations of the medium.
This workshop is designed to demonstrate the wide variety of applications of Second Life in higher education and also explore the broad uses of Second Life. Participants will experience Second Life projects and work on planning and designing their own projects that can be implemented to meet their own specific outcomes in Second Life. Presenters will discuss the issues experienced during implementations of projects on their own campuses and share the pitfalls and successes that come with project implementation.
Objectives:
Attendees will:
1. Gain an understanding of the breadth of Second Life usage to enhance student experiences.
2. Gain an understanding of basic building and scripting techniques.
3. Learn what is involved from the perspective of an instructional technology department to support the design and implementation of a Second Life project.
4. Engage in the planning and initial design of their own Second Life projects.
Emotional and Multiple Intelligences in the Virtual Classroom
Presented by: Dawn Muhammad – Central Texas College
Date: Wednesday, May 26, 2010 from 9am-12pm
Location: Omni Austin Hotel
Fee: $25
Requirements: Preconference workshops are open to conference registrants only.
Audience Level: All Levels
Description: Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Multiple Intelligences (MI) are especially important in the online classroom. In this session, participants will learn their EI Quotient along with their dominant intelligences (MI). Once assessed, participants will discuss the methods they prefer and usually teach towards. Lastly, participants will learn how to incorporate EI building activities and multiple intelligences in the virtual classroom.
Objectives:
1. To self reflect on teaching methods.
2. To understand current level of emotional and multiple intelligences-self and others.
3. To demonstrate techniques that incorporates a number of multiple intelligences while building emotional intelligence.
SoftChalk Lesson Builder meets Quality Matters Standards for Online Courses
Presented by: Dr. Samita Goshal – Lone Star College-CyFair
Date: Wednesday, May 26, 2010 from 9am-12pm
Location: Omni Austin Hotel
Fee: $25 (This workshop is limited to 10 participants.)
Requirements: Preconference workshops are open to conference registrants only.
Audience Level: Beginner/Intermediate
Description: Quality Matters is a nationally recognized organization which has developed a set of forty specific elements, distributed across eight broad standards, used to evaluate the design of online and hybrid courses. These standards help to design the layout of a course, making sure it is optimal for student learning.
SoftChalk provides the unique opportunity to build rich, interactive content material in compliance with these Quality Matters (QM) Standards. Using SoftChalk, the QM rubric can be applied to meet the required standards easily and effectively. These standards include: accessibility, defining learning objectives, student engagement and course navigation (to name a few). The tools in SoftChalk lesson builder are compliant with Quality Matters Standards.
In this workshop participants will learn how to use SoftChalk Lesson Builder to create professional lessons for their online or hybrid courses. It is quick and easy to create rich content with interactive learning games, self-assessment quizzes, and include media to increase student engagement in the learning process. The interactive content material is built to meet ADA compliance.
Lesson activities that are engaging are keys to keep our students active in learning. Providing them with self assessment tools helps to reinforce concepts. SoftChalk allows creation of such activities simply without any requirement of specific software knowledge.
The key element of Quality Matters Rubric is to align activities, resources and assessments to the learning objectives for the course. SoftChalk Lesson Builder provides the basic tools to incorporate learning objectives into lesson activities. SoftChalk Lesson Builder also allows creation of manageable content material by creating pages for the lessons.
Courses created in SoftChalk provide an excellent example of best practices for online teaching.
It is also easy to deliver lessons built in SoftChalk as they can be packaged via CD-ROM, Intranet and Internet or integrated with a learning management system.
Objectives:
Participants will be able to:
1. Create text, interactive lessons and graphic content using SoftChalk Lesson Builder.
2. Apply Quality Matters Standards in building their course content in Softchalk Lesson Builder.