Kick off the League’s Conference on Information Technology with this annual gathering of community college Chief Information Officers. Summit participants discuss effective strategies, timely issues, and model information technology and infrastructure programs. The summit’s experienced technology leaders facilitate discussions about creative approaches and hot topics such as information security, student email systems, servicing the millennial generation, and being a successful CIO. Participants also break into small groups for peer-related topic discussions concerning important issues such as emergency communications, procurement management, and supporting faculty using Web 2.0 tools. Join technology leaders and college administrators as they strengthen their commitment to improving the information technology systems in our colleges today while creating a vision for tomorrow.

Todd Jorns, Senior Director
Instructional Technology
Illinois Community College Board

Kimberley Conley, Chief Information Officer
Henderson Community College - KCTCS

Kenneth Green, Director
The Campus Computing Project

With SNAP from Paradigm Publishing, students can demonstrate and enhance computer skills learned in the classroom. Features of SNAP include training tutorials, concept exams, skill-based Microsoft Office simulation exams, automatic checking of Microsoft Office documents, and learning management and communication tools. This course provides, from the student perspective, an in-depth, hands-on experience using SNAP, a state-of-the-art tool for training, assessing, and managing student proficiency with MS Office 2007 in web-based learning environments. No local IT resources are required for your students to become SNAP users.

Karen Lankisch, Consultant
Paradigm Publishing

iPods, PDAs, and MP3 players are very popular, but they do not compare to the over one billion cell phones sold in 2007. Course participants learn where to find and use effective learning activities that work well with cell phones and leave with ideas about how to use them in their courses. After a brief review of mobile learning, the focus shifts to different types of activities that work effectively with cell phones (i.e. QRCodes, blogging, chatting, IMing, photos, virtual field trips, digital storytelling, annotation, geotagging). Participants visit websites that provide tools and services for these activities and learn how to use them for effective instruction. Participants also have access to a wiki where resources and tutorials are stored. This course is for anyone interested in immediately integrating mobile learning into their course. Bring your cell phone!

Debi McGuire, Director
Distance Learning and Professional Development
Wilkes Community College

This course covers how to identify good online content and courses, how to find and use good learning objects and courses, and how to develop and share high-quality teaching and learning content with colleagues around the world. Participants also learn about how they can participate in the open education resources (OER) movement to increase quality and access to knowledge worldwide. Participants explore various guidelines for making quality learning content, share examples of effective learning objects, and discuss what makes them effective instructional tools. Also explored are the importance of creating and using metadata with learning objects.

Ruth Rominger, Director
Learning Design
National Repository of Online Courses

Tests and quizzes are traditional tools used to assess student performance. But the use of these tools in online courses bring with them the potential for cheating, which means they may not adequately represent what students have learned. Alternative strategies and the use of an online learning community can help deter cheating. Participants leave this course with a toolkit of alternative assessments, activities for community building, and the skills to align assessment activities with course content for optimum learning outcomes. Discussed are how instructors can determine whether students have met course objectives if tests and quizzes are not the main means of assessment, how to select assessment tools most appropriate to the online environment, and how to develop a learning community that helps to achieve course outcomes.

Rena Palloff, Faculty and Director
Educational Leadership and Change
Fielding Graduate University

Keith Pratt, Faculty
Business
Capella University

Participants gain valuable hands-on experience with several new, free, and web-based communications applications that can be used inside any virtual learning environment (VLE). These services are particularly useful in education because of their special emphasis on collaboration and social networking. Used during the course is Desire2Learn, but the principles apply equally well to other VLEs (i.e. Blackboard, Angel, Moodle). Explored during this course are the use of video, music playlists, photos, wikis, instant messaging, social bookmarking, Twitter, web office, RSS, and more. Participants engage in online collaborative activities during the course that simulate projects they could assign to their students.

Barry Dahl, Vice President
Lake Superior Connect
Lake Superior College

Through a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education grant, the IT Across Careers (ITAC) project offers resources for teaching and assessing basic IT skills through authentic workplace problem scenarios designed to cultivate students’ workplace readiness and higher order thinking skills. Using ITAC resources can support outcomes-based curriculum models and provide evidence of student learning aligned to skills standards. During this course, participants learn how to customize and adapt materials from the web-based resource library using ITAC’s dynamic curriculum generator. Covered during the course are a brief overview of the ITAC project; ITAC resources; using rubrics to assess basic IT user skills; realworld examples of how IT is used across various careers and industry sectors; and authentic, problem-based scenarios that integrate IT and course content.

Linda Scott, Project Manager
Learning and Teaching
Education Development Center

Joyce Malyn-Smith, Principal Investigator
Nsf Project: The Social Media Enabled Technician
Education Development Center

More than 60 community colleges are participating in the new Open Educational Resources (OER) movement that provides high-quality, accessible, and culturally relevant open textbooks to community college students and faculty. Course participants receive the OER handbook and participate in the following modules: Introduction to the Open Educational Resources Movement; Advantages and Disadvantages of Creating and Using OER in Community Colleges; Methods to Locate and Use OER in the Classroom; OER and Fair Use and Copyright Issues; An Exploration of OER Repositories and Tools; The Emerging World of Open Textbooks; OER and the Importance of Accessibility, Interoperability, and Cultural Relevance; The Community College Consortium for OER; and The Community College Open Textbook Project. Community college faculty, administrators, and other interested educational partners are invited to join and participate in the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources.

Martha Kanter, Under Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education

Judy Baker, Dean
Foothill Global Access
Foothill-De Anza Community College District

Hal Plotkin, Trustee
Governing Board of Trustees
Foothill-De Anza Community College District

Gary Lopez, Executive Director
Monterey Institute for Technology and Education
National Repository of Online Courses

Barbara Illowsky, Professor
Math
Foothill-De Anza Community College District

Joel Thierstein, Executive Director
Connexions Project
Rice University