"Visualizing Population Data Geographically"

Stan Becker, Professor of Population, Family and Reproductive Health
Nazish Zafar, 4th year Graduate Student in Sociology

  - In most public health courses, statistical data are central to understanding population and health indicators as they relate to issues such as fertility and life expectancy. However, raw statistical data of one country do not usually illustrate that country’s geographical relationship to other countries or reveal broader global public health patterns. Visualizing the indicators of the countries based on their locations on the map can be difficult, especially since current resources do not usually map the latest data within a global setting, which is essential for contextual and spatial analysis.

"Setting up Guest Access in Blackboard"

Amy Brusini, Instructional Technology Specialist, CER

  - When Blackboard courses are created, access is restricted to members of the JHU community who are enrolled in each course (instructors, TAs, and students) and have working JHED IDs. But with the Guest Management application developed by IT@JH, it is possible to create and distribute guest login accounts that are open to anyone, including those outside of JHU.

"Wikis"

Hérica Valladares, Assistant Professor of Classics
Macie Hall, Instructional Designer, CER

  - A wiki is a webpage or website that allows collaborative editing. A wiki invites participants to take part in the creation of the site content. Typically edits are tracked and a history of the contributions can be viewed.

"Digital Labs: Drawing Ancient Inscriptions"

Kyle McCarter, Professor, Near Eastern Studies Department

  - In an epigraphy course students learn to decipher and analyze inscriptions and manuscripts using traditional philological tools. The ultimate goals are to translate and interpret texts, but before they can begin to do those things, students need to become familiar with the physical characteristics of the ancient documents we study, especially the shape and other features of the writing itself. So our first job is to enhance the students' ability simply to "see" ancient writing, and this can be a challenge when using traditional tools.

"Calibrating Multiple Graders"

Pamela R. Bennett, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Andrew J. Cherlin, Professor & Chair of Sociology
Michael J. Reese, 5th Year Graduate Student in Sociology

  - Assessing student work in large classes can be complicated when several faculty or multiple teaching assistants share the responsibility. In a calibration exercise, multiple individuals work together to score a sample of student submissions before dividing and individually grading the remaining student work.

"Classroom Performance System (‘Clickers’)"

Richard Shingles, Lecturer, Biology

  - The Classroom Performance System, also known as "Clickers", is an instructional technology that allows instructors to rapidly collect and analyze student responses to questions posed during class. This student response system can make a class more engaging and allows students, who would normally refrain from answering oral questions in class, the opportunity to contribute to questions posed by the instructor. Instructors can also obtain real-time feedback as to how well students understand concepts taught in the class.

"Civility in the Classroom"

Dr. Pier Massimo Forni, German and Romance Languages and Literatures

  - Faculty profession of knowledge used to rest on the firm foundation of the principle of authority. Most students granted their teachers respect and sometimes deference as a matter of course. That foundation has been crumbling for at least three generations. The new digital technology has virtually razed it. As college teachers, it is imperative that we realize what this means for our relationship with our students and for the future of education.

"Image Resolution"

Reid Sczerba, Multimedia Developer, CER

  - Image resolution is a concept that always comes up when working with digital images. The resolution of an image has implications for the final output of the image, whether that output is a printed poster or an image on a website. An understanding of image resolution ensures that the end result is clear, crisp, and of an appropriate file size.

"Facebook"

Macie Hall, Instructional Designer, CER

  - Facebook is an online social networking service, designed to enable users to build communities of people who share interests. Social networking services provide different ways for users to interact online through tools such as virtual bulletin boards, blogs, wikis, e-mail, and instant messaging. Users can also share content, such as photos and videos. The name "Facebook" comes from the term for printed directories of student pictures and information distributed each year to incoming college freshmen so that they can identify each other.

"Lectures On Demand"

Michael Falk, Associate Professor, Materials Science & Engineering

  - Applied science programming courses typically involve the instructor writing examples of code during class as students follow along at their computers. Students may occasionally work through simple examples on their own, but they spend most of class passively watching the instructor.

"Teaching with Images"

Adrienne Lai, Art Libraries Society of North America Intern

  - Strategic use of images in the classroom helps engage students who have grown up in a media-rich environment. Digital technology makes images more readily available and easier to incorporate into teaching and learning materials.

"Blackboard"

Amy Brusini, Instructional Technology Specialist, CER

  - Blackboard is a web-based course management system that allows instructors to present course material and interact with students in an online environment. Depending on the instructor’s needs, Blackboard can be used either to supplement face to face courses or present courses entirely online.

"Embedding Research into the Curriculum"

Dr. Stephen Plank, Sociology

  - The complementary relationship between teaching and research was integral to President Gilman’s vision in establishing Johns Hopkins. Great researchers bring new ideas and practices into the classroom for the benefit of students, who can in turn contribute to new discoveries by engaging in the research process.

"Creating a Covenant with Your Students"

Dr. Pier Massimo Forni, German and Romance Languages and Literatures

  - If you have been dealing with student attitudes that mix disengagement with disregard, you are not alone. Millions of educators around the world are in your position. One way to improve the situation is to make your expectations explicit.

"ARTstor"

Adrienne Lai, Art Libraries Society of North America Intern

  - ARTstor is a non-profit digital image library available through the JHU Libraries. It consists of over a million images, along with essential data, of subject matter relevant to many disciplines. Despite its name, ARTstor isn’t just pictures of art or humanitiescentric. It contains images that are of great value for didactic and illustrative purposes in the social sciences, basic sciences and engineering.

"Visualizing Museums"

Dr. Elizabeth Rodini, History of Art, Museums and Society

  - Many survey courses cover a lot of ground with little time available to probe individual topics in depth. A 200 level introductory course that provides an overview of 500 years of museum history with political, social, and cultural implications, for example, offers few opportunities to explore topics in depth.

"Teaching Assistant Training Institute"

Richard Shingles, Director of the TA Training Institute

  - The Teaching Assistant Training Institute consists of a team of professionals managed by the Center for Educational Resources to provide general instructional training for full-time graduate and undergraduate students with teaching assignments in the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences or the Whiting School of Engineering.

"Timeline Creator"

Mike Reese, Assistant Director, Center for Educational Resources

  - The Timeline Creator software allows instructors, students, and researchers without multimedia development skills to develop an interactive timeline for teaching or presentation purposes. The resulting timeline can be published on the World Wide Web, through BlackBoard or other content management systems, or presented directly from a computer.