Information Technology Services

By: Jennifer Albat

I recently watched an inspiring webinar on adding humor to your online courses. It featured Lisa Panagopoulos, assistant director of faculty development for online learning at University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Why would you want to add humor in online classes? According to the webinar, online ourses can be “sterile, impersonal, remote, or dry.” With online courses often being heavy in text, viewing them can become cumbersome and digesting the material can be di...

The offices of Educational Outreach, Disability Support Services, and Information Technology Services are collaborating to bring Blackboard Ally to your Blackboard courses.

Blackboard Ally is a product that provides alternate formats for uploaded PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and HTML content, in order to meet the needs of diverse learners. For example, it can convert a text document to an audio file. It also assists faculty in making content more accessible by pointing out where formatting can be imp...

By: Emily Keener

Are you curious about using Poll Everywhere in your classes, departmental meetings, or other events? ITS offers one-on-one and group training sessions for faculty and staff interested in using the audience polling software. Please reach out to set up an option that's right for you.

Or, if you would just like to learn more about what Poll Everywhere can do, consider attending one of Poll Everywhere's weekly Getting Started webinars.

For more how-to materials on using Poll...

By: Niki Glick

Last month, I sat in on a classroom simulation where SIUE education majors practiced their teaching skills using SIUE's Virtual Practice Lab, formerly known as TeachLivE. The early education majors were teaching a group of 7-year-old "students" the definition of a new word. But the "students" in this simulation were actually adult actors in some other location, trained to emulate real elementary children: disrupting class by falling asleep, talking to their neighbors, and struggl...