My colleague, Robert Elliot, invited me to be a guest moderator in his distance education course: Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web during the week of November 4th to the 9th, 2012. I have had the pleasure of guest moderating this same course taught by him in previous terms and this term was equally interesting and beneficial. English teachers throughout the world are the participants in these distance education courses.

What I enjoy most about this course is the content; engaging teachers on how to utilize technology effectively in their pedagogy is one of my professional passions. I find it so gratifying to teach educators how to incorporate and enhance their curriculum with technology. This passion began when I was a university student at the UO, I worked at what is now called the UO Help Desk. I was responsible for helping students, faculty, and staff with their email accounts and their technical problems with their computers. I found that I loved being able to support faculty and staff do something more efficiently or more effectively and thusly making the educational process more interesting and engaging for students. Teaching technological skills is very hands-on and I find that it gives me a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when I can help educators become comfortable with and develop a sense of ownness of their own technological skills.

There are pedagogically-related themes throughout the course and the week that I moderated the topics were student-centered large classes and interactive PowerPoint. I found this topic and the readings associated with it to be very relevant to what’s happening to several universities worldwide including the UO: increased student enrollment to cover the lack of support for public universities. This topic was highly relevant and the international participants, being no stranger to large class sizes, were able to offer some creative solutions to make ever-growing language courses more interactive and student-centered.

Since I was guest moderating in this course during the same week that I attended the EDUCAUSE conference, my ears were tuned in for readings and resources that I might be able to share with these students. Engaging students by having them answer multiple choice polling questions on their mobile device was a big trend at the conference, so I linked them to an article on BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) from EDUCAUSE. Additionally, their materials included some videos from Garr Reynolds who is most famous for his Presentation Zen principles on well-designed professional presentations. Here is one of the videos that I have used with my students in the past as an example of what not to do in a presentation:

It was great to be able to participate in this course and I hope I will have the opportunity to participate again in future terms.