This week we had three interesting events offered by the Educational Technologies Center.
First, in an ETC spotlight on Tuesday, John LeMasney gave an overview of Picasa, Google’s image and video cataloging tool. In the session, John showed users how to metatag, geotag, caption, and enhance media items. He went over Picasa’s face recognition, moviemaking, publishing, and album making features. Finally, he demonstrated Picasa’s key functionality: searching for items in large media catalogs using filters, keywords, and flags. Here’s the entire session for your review.
On Wednesday, during the Lunch & Learn session, Yannis Kevrekidis, Garnet K.-L. Chan, Curt Hillegas spoke on Princeton University’s most recent research computing activities. From the abstract: “Computational modeling and analysis continues to grow as the third paradigm of research alongside experiment and theory. Princeton University’s research computing activity has grown to keep pace with and provide leadership for this international trend including faculty across many disciplines and departments. We will highlight two professors’ work – Professor Garnet Chan from Chemistry and Professor Yannis Kevrekidis from Chemical and Biological Engineering – to show how computational science and engineering is enabling and accelerating scientific discovery. Curt Hillegas, director of research computing, will also talk about the central HPC resources that are available to the University community and how to access them.” Here is the session for your review.
On Thursday, during the Productive Scholar session, Shaun Holland and Sean Piotrowski talked about using gaming to engage students in the classroom. They presented the idea that games and services like Foursquare, Minecraft, and Portal provide good examples of collaborative engagement that can be applied to the classroom because these games appeal to an average student’s sense of achievement, competition, and challenge. This presentation demonstrated some popular forms of gamification in higher education and real world examples to apply to one’s teaching. Here’s the entire session for your review.
