Summary from the iLevel Advisory Meeting, October 16, 2002
Marcel O'Gormann
1) Assessment and Evaluation.
Assessment is possibly the most important thing for us to focus on as we enter year 3. I hope that Elaine and Emmy will still be able to follow through on the evaluations of faculty and students this fall, so that we can get some ground level numbers to work with. For the meeting, we should be able to discuss the evaluation forms, and strategize about the implementation. The Dept. of Psychology has offered to help with compiling the data, appropriately enough.
2) iGrants
Yesterday, I sent out the notice about iGrants. This year the grants are limited to $1000 and the hope is that we can get faculty to secure additional funds from other sources. This strategy not only allows us to give out more grants, but it also gets the departments and colleges more involved with the iLevel Project and the IT activities of faculty. Thanks to Tom, the iGrant web form has been streamlined and revamped. We will start reviewing apps at our next meeting.
3) Smart Classrooms
The equipment and cabling for the Smart classrooms discussed in July have all been ordered. Installation should begin by the end of the month. Pending availability of rollover funds, we should continue to earmark additional rooms for "ismarting." Your suggestions are welcome, of course.
4) Kiosks
The equipment and furniture for 3 kiosks in the Student Union have been ordered. The kiosks will feature iMacs (iLevel iMacs) with a wireless connection. Two kiosks will be at a seating level, and the third will be for standing use. They will be located by the pay phones in the Fountain Lounge area. I think our best bet would be to test the use and effectiveness of these machines, and then decide whether or not to install more across campus. It would be great if we could track student use of the kiosks, and maybe even hit them with a short survey somehow.
5) Tech Mentors
Emmy has run into the excellent problem of having the Mentors be too much in demand. We need to think about the limits of the Mentors' responsibilities, and discuss ways to ease the load on them. Rather than having them engaged regularly in teaching whole classes of students, I would rather see them train faculty how to use the software and subsequently teach their students.
7) Laptop Workshops/summer institute
We should start gearing up for the Laptop Workshops (or whatever you want to call them) that we discussed at the end of Year 2. I will check the budget to see how many laptops we can fund. I hope that Sarah can help out by getting the IDS folks involved in training. We need to think about what to include in the training. For starters: basic use of the laptop; how to connect and use laptop peripherals (projector, printer, wireless, etc.); BlackBoard course setup; course-oriented Web design (Dreamweaver and Fireworks); FTP; maybe Excel, at least for gradekeeping.
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