Faculty Development Consortium

Judson College continues to be well represented at the annual Instructional Technology Conferences sponsored by the Faculty Development Consortium. Judith Roberts, Norma Harper, Thomas Wilson, Curtis Meisenheimer, and Ruth Kastenmayer are Program Committee members and they helped shape the nature of the conferences. Wilson, Kastenmayer, and Meisenheimer again presented workshops at the conference demonstrating their use of technology in the classroom and in other aspects of Judson’s educational program.

The Judson presenters used a combination of PowerPoint slides, Internet, WWW applications, the Judson J-Net and the Judson Web site to illustrate and explain the use of technology in many aspects of Judson life.

Kastenmayer explained the purpose and power of an academic network and how it unites instructional efforts with the institution and with the external world. Ruth explained with slides how to capture images from the screen, the WWW, publisher’s CDs, transparencies, and clip art. Ruth talked about Judson’s E-Commerce Center and the importance of providing student internships in Web page design and construction.

Meisenheimer demonstrated the use of animation, movie files, AVI files, Web images, and graphics imported into PowerPoint presentations for lectures in physics and astronomy. The animated asteroid sequence from NASA is a real show stopper and causes many participants to marvel at the magic of technology.

Wilson entertained the audience with imported movie files and animations of birds, bugs, coral animals and other images used in PowerPoint presentations in some of his lectures. Wilson discussed and illustrated examples of how technology is used in the biology department. This included course syllabi, descriptions of pre-professional programs, home pages, outlines of major requirements, and career advising.
	Wilson presented a laboratory experiment involving chemistry, spectrophotometry, and Microsoft Excel. The absorbance spectrum of chlorophyll made a colorful slide and the audience was impressed by the procedure of plotting data superimposed on the published spectral graph.
SCI 101 Concepts of Science was demonstrated as a team-taught course using technology. Instructors in this course worked with International Thompson Publishers and created a custom text. The syllabus for this course was posted on the ITP Web Site and was linked to the publishers ancillary Web links. Judson's Concepts of Science represented the first course to be posted on the new ITP WorldClass Learning site.

Web Center Interns, Stephanie Highsmith, Melissa Boykin, and Melissa Curlee presented their work in Web page construction. Their program was run from the laptop hard drive and it included selections from the entire Judson Web site. It appeared that the students were presenting their examples live on the Internet. People were amazed at how “fast” the Judson Web pages appeared. They did not realize that the pages were coming from the computer hard drive. Professional presentations should never rely on the live Internet because it is subject to slow access, crashes, and user error.

Judson is the only institution in which students have presented programs at these Instructional Technology Conferences. Judson is the only college or university in Alabama with a WebZine ... an electronic magazine (The WebSpinner).

Ted Whisenhunt attended the conference and, along with the students, Wilson and Kastenmayer, participated in an Adobe Photoshop workshop.

The FDC sponsors technology workshops for consortium members. Judson is invited to suggest a workshop subject and attend the training session in the FDC laboratory at Auburn. We all should take advantage of this opportunity and schedule workshops that will meet our immediate needs of Instructional Technology.