NASHVILLE, Tenn. — This week, community college leaders were treated to the best in instructional technology by day and the best in country music by night at the Conference on Information Technology in Nashville. Hosted by the League for Innovation in the Community College, the 23rd annual CIT conference had 2,300 attendees from around the world, and League president and CEO Gerardo E. de los Santos says he was “extremely pleased” with the turnout at the conference, which wrapped up Wednesday.
The League has forged a relationship with educators from the Netherlands in recent years, and now the Netherlands has its own equivalent of the League, de los Santos says. “We have approximately 80 attendees that are from the Netherlands that have joined us, so we’re delighted about that, and that just shows the international reach of this work and of this conference,” he adds.
Sessions at this year’s CIT focused on a wide range of instructional technology tips and tools, titles included “Podcasting: Production and Distribution of Classroom Content,” “Using Technology to Motivate Distance Learning Students” and “Getting the Faculty to Web 2.0 and 3.0.”
This year’s CIT also featured some informative keynote presentations, including Dr. Christopher Dede from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and Dr. Randal Pinkett, founder of consulting firm BCT Partners and winner of season four of the hit reality TV show “The Apprentice.”
Dede’s presentation focused on making learning more effective by making it fun. He emphasized that if students are engaged with learning activities that are able to tap their imagination, the potential for true engagement is magnified. He spoke about an exercise that he and other Harvard faculty developed to boost math learning among high school students.
Titled “Alien Invasion,” the exercise involved staging a mock alien invasion of a high school. Students were given GPS-enabled Pocket PCs, and they were tasked with discovering who the alien invaders were and what were their intentions via a complex set of mathematics equations they had to decipher at various points on a map. The math exercises got rave reviews from the students who said the injection of fun actually helped them learn better than standard lectures.
- Community College Jobs