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Friday, July 14, 2006: 10:00 AM-10:45 AM
Michigan A Room (Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers)
M-10: Stepping Outside the Classroom - Physically And Mentally
Detailed Description:Learn to use technology to revise your teaching routine to create e-learning links, interactive online communication, and student support systems within a paperless course. This session will help instructors and course designers to connect the value links between the assignments that worked in the classroom and to recreate those same learning values online. Discover how to work smarter (not harder) through technology and create a 100% paperless semester.
Presentation Format:Showcase
Topic:Empowering educators: Professional development models and methods
Target Audience:Course Designers, Faculty and Other Instructors, E-learning Managers
Appropriate Audience Level:Beginning or new users of WebCT, Experienced WebCT users
Abstract Text:This session's objectives are designed to assist online educators and developers into moving their teaching and learning concepts and educational processes to the wide open spaces of virtual on-line e-education concepts. E-teachers are not born, they are just new and improved versions of former classroom teachers. In order to be successful online, the teaching process within your mind must go through a virtual transformation process. Once you have stepped out of the 4-walls classroom boundary both physically and mentally, all types of virtual pathways to success will begin to open up to your educational possibility process thinking.

This session's objectives include; moving educators thinking processes outside of the classroom context, empowering educators and designers with examples of virtual e-educational possibilities, creating course communication support links that enable e-learners to connect within the virtual classroom and support successful course completion, incorporating e-technologies into your course design to create a paperless teaching process.

Share amusing yet frustrating stories of what successful on-line innovative instructors have had to endure to push and pull their administrators and co-workers along into the virtual classroom process. These anecdotes, while amusing, also point the way towards improved possibility thinking within those wide open virtual reality classroom settings. Some of these ideas include designing the classroom calendar for a 24/7 week and not a Mon-Fri week, on-line instructor office hours, group projects to be completed within the chat room, and asking students what they need for successful course completions.

If you are already into this brave new virtual-classroom and are seeking on-going course design and development ideas or if you are new to this process, this session will assist the process of starting your on-line course design process using the “What if,? - virtual possibility thinking processes.”



Session Leader:Dr. Suzzanne Gust-Thomason
College of the Mainland

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