News

The deadline for faculty to submit proposals to present at the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology has been extended to December 19. This free event will be held Saturday, April 18, 2009 from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel, University Park. A continental breakfast and lunch will be provided. This year's theme is "Student Engagement and the Culture of Teaching and Learning." To reflect this theme, presentations will highlight students' involvement in the learning process.

Faculty who are using technology to enrich teaching, learning, or research are encouraged to submit a presentation proposal using the online form at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/2009proposal/. Topics could involve faculty and students collaborating on a project or an assignment showcasing students using any number of collaborative tools and new learning spaces. Some examples include the use of shared learning resources, the incorporation of digital media, and any best practices that foster student ownership of learning. Sessions can be in a variety of formats, including group presentations, panel discussions, poster presentations, demonstrations, small-group discussions, and other activities. Each session should include some discussion of practical aspects such as the tools used, sources of support, best practices, and how the application of technology can be transferred to other disciplines. For more details and to register, visit http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/. The Symposium is sponsored by Information Technology Services.

To participate in any of the sessions listed below, go to http://se.adobe.acrobat.com/timothyp/ at the date and time of the session. Audio will be delivered both through the meeting room and over the phone by calling 866-846-3997 and giving the security code 726466

Adobe Dreamweaver CS4--Web Publishing with the Pros
December 3
10:00-11:30 a.m.

Audience: Beginning Web developers who need to create a Web page quickly and effectively--with or without an interest in HTML, XML, or CSS

Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is full-featured Web site creation and management tool that allows you to create a simple, yet effective Web presence for you, your group, or your entire organization. By focusing on ease-of-use and Web standards such as Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and XHTML, Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 helps you to ensure that the work you create can be viewed by your entire audience-not just those with the browser you use. This session will cover the basics of Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, including:

• Setting up a Web site and preparing it for upload
• Creating basic pages for your site
• Working with images
• Adding links
• Building page structure for ease of editing
• Uploading to a server

During this hour-and-a-half session you will see the basics that make Adobe
Dreamweaver CS4 the industry-standard Web site creation tool.

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Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
January 14
10:00-11:30 a.m.

Audience: Intermediate Web developers who need to create a Web page and stake that page to the next step with interactive elements and some basic code work.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 offers some powerful tools for creating and editing Web sites that take you to Web 2.0. By combining Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), AJAX, and Spry technologies, you can quickly create a dynamic Web site that is easy to update and keep current. Plus, because you can use Web-standard technologies to make all of this happen, you won't prevent anyone from being able to access the content on your Web site. In this hour-and-a-half long session, you will see how to:

• Create and edit CSS for both text and objects
• Apply CSS to multiple pages in your site
• Create a Spry Widget that allows you to simply and quickly bind a Web page to a live data source
• Add Adobe Contribute to the site, so you can offer quick, easy updating by others to your Web site
• Add behaviors, such as rollover effects, to your pages

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Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended--Changing the Nature of the Word "Document"
February 18
10am-11:30am

Audience: Anyone who works with documents such as ePortfolios, forms, manuals, tests, presentations, contracts, or spreadsheets

Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional does much more than create PDF files. During this session, you will learn how to use Adobe Acrobat as a tool for working with documents to do more than just create a digital replacement for paper.

You will learn how to:

• Combine any type of document into a single, easy-to-navigate PDF file
• Add non-PDF information such as movies, Flash files, sound, and templates to complete the document
• Use Acrobat and Adobe PDF as a tool for collaborating with your documents to be sure that you account for the thoughts of all of your colleagues--even those who only have the free Reader
• Control access to your work so that you can protect sensitive or private data.
• Collect data using PDF files as forms whether you are collecting data from paper or electronically
• Add multi-media to your documents to enhance the information you want to share, engage your audience, and effectively get your point across to a broad audience

Plus, you'll see Adobe Presenter--included with Adobe Acrobat
Professional Extended. It's a tool for creating interactive PDF files with quizzing and assessment built right in from your Microsoft PowerPoint projects.

Using these features effectively in Adobe Acrobat Professional Extended will save you money, and more importantly, time as you live in a document-based world.

To help faculty, students, and staff more easily find information about its services, Teaching and Learning with Technology, a unit of Information Technology Services, has redesigned its Web site at http://tlt.its.psu.edu/.
 
The site's new home page features quick links to topics grouped by category. These help reduce the number of times visitors must click to reach relevant information. To illustrate examples of how its services are being used by individual members of the Penn State community to enhance teaching and learning, the site also features stories, videos, and photos. These demonstrate how the unit's services benefit--and inspire--a variety of people from a wide spectrum of academic fields, not only "technology" fields.
 
Several of the unit's services have multiple Web pages associated with them. For each of these services, individual "springboard" pages were created which provide a brief overview along with all the related links to pull all the relevant information together.
 
The site also provides News, Events, and Discussion sections. Visitors can subscribe to each of these using an RSS feed reader to receive the latest updates.
 
For any questions, e-mail tlt@psu.edu.

Registration is open for the technology workshops and overviews offered by Information Technology Services this fall. This semester, students, faculty, and staff at all Penn State campuses can take advantage of live or recorded sessions that are being offered online through Adobe Connect meeting software. Popular overview and hands-on topics include Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Data Warehouse, ANGEL, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, podcasting, cascading style sheets, and many more. Visit the Web site for details on all available training options or to register for training at http://its.psu.edu/training/.

Faculty who are interested in using computers with the operating system Linux for their courses can reserve computer labs at 316 Hammond Building and 216 Osmond Building. The Linux labs give faculty, students, and staff the opportunity to work on a powerful operating system that is quickly being adopted into business, industry, science, education, and government.

The Linux labs machines are state-of-the-art high performance computers, set at large desks with 30-inch monitors at each station to provide students with a natural collaborative work area. The labs also feature a podium computer with projector.

The Linux computer labs can be useful to faculty teaching a variety of subjects. Linux offers benefits such as a high amount of computing power, a variety of programming languages, and a selection of modeling and calculating software such as Mathematica,
Matlab, Ansys, Abaqus, Comsol, and many others. If faculty need a specific type of software for their course, they can request it to be added by emailing clc-linux@psu.edu.

The Hammond lab has twenty-four Linux computers and can seat forty students in collaborative work areas, while the Osmond lab has seventeen computers and can seat thirty-two students. The Faculty can reserve either lab for an entire semester or on an ad-hoc basis.

To help faculty learn more about Linux, ITS Training Services is offering Getting Started with Unix/Linux January 10 from noon to 2:00 p.m. at 23 Willard Building. The training session is being offered as part of the Winter-Fest technology training week, and enables attendees to acquire a basic understanding of Linux. Visit the ITS Training Web site for details and to register at http://its.psu.edu/training/.

The Linux labs are maintained by Classroom and Lab Computing, a unit of Teaching and Learning with Technology, in collaboration with the University Committee on Instructional Facilities. For more information on Linux labs, please visit http://clc.its.psu.edu/Labs/Linux/. You can see photos of the Hammond lab here: http://clc.its.psu.edu/Labs/Linux/hammond.aspx. To reserve a Linux lab, faculty should contact their departmental scheduling coordinator.

ANGEL Shorts are one-page documents covering a specific point of interest in Penn State's Course Management System, ANGEL. They cover the five most essential things a person needs to know about the topic in order to get the most from its use. The aim is to help faculty, staff, and students maximize the value of using ANGEL as a teaching tool. The latest issue of ANGEL Shorts focuses on "Five Things Faculty Should Know about Publishing Final Grades." This issue, as well as all previous issues of ANGEL Shorts, is available as a downloadable PDF file on the ANGEL Community Hub at http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel/.

Turnitin is conducting a beta test of a new, enhanced version of their Web-based plagiarism prevention resource, and faculty and staff are invited to participate. Some of the enhancements being evaluated include a redesigned interface, expanded student paper databases, improved Originality Reports, and expanded content databases.

For more information about participating in the beta test and to see demonstrations of some of the enhancements, please attend one of two informative online sessions offered Thursday, May 15 at 1:00 p.m. or Friday, May 16 at 10:00 a.m. in the Adobe Connect meeting room at https://breeze.psu.edu/turnitin/. Before joining a Connect meeting, please read through the Getting Started information at http://meeting.psu.edu/quickstart and test your connection with our generic test meeting room at https://breeze.psu.edu/testmeetingroom/. Questions can be directed to turnitin@psu.edu.