IITAP Exemplars
Ta Falado: Brazilian Portuguese Pronunciation (2008)
Ta Falado presents over 40 podcast lessons targeting similarities and differences in pronunciation between Spanish and Portuguese. Each lesson is supplemented by downloadable PDF files with observations about the topics and by a discussion blog where users can ask for clarifications. The podcast format provides teachers with a way to make students aware of the language they hear so they can focus on aspects of Portuguese and Spanish that they would otherwise not notice.
Expanding the Classroom: Mobile Technologies for Construction Education (2008)
Construction is difficult to teach in a classroom, because the focus is spatial reasoning involving job sites, materials flows, and work areas. With sensor motes and custom software that runs on tablet PCs, instructors recreate a jobsite in a large-scale yet safe environment to simulate a construction project, presenting tasks in materials management and scheduling. The interface, using readily-available programming tools, can be customized for a variety of applications, allowing instuctors to expand the classroom to encompass a large, realistic imitation of the construction site.
Reading Between the Lines/Lyre entre les lignes (2008)
For French 326K, an intensive course covering 6 centuries of literature in 14 weeks, the Web site provides students a poetic tutor to support proficiency in understanding "old" poetry and practicing the art of the explication de texte under tight course constraints. Students read more poetry in greater depth in the same amount of time, using the site to work independently before working in the community of their peers, preparing to confront a final exercise with experience and greater confidence. Students improve their concentration, comprehension, and retention, learning to work non-linearly and to find the relevance of texts for understanding France today.
Psychopathology in Action: A clinical diagnostic tool for students (2008)
In an interactive and engaging online environment, students with little to no clinical experience learn critical skills for clinical diagnosis. They can envision how mental disorders manifest themselves using realistic case materials. They learn to recognize challenges and limitations in applying diagnostic criteria, enhancing their skills in crafting clinical recommendations.
Sandstone Petrology: A Tutorial Petrographic Image Atlas (2008)
As earth sciences curricula expand, petrography—the study of rocks using various forms of microscopy—is at particular risk, because it is teacher-intensive, requiring an expert guide and many hours of exposure to examples, as well as microscopes and an appropriate collection of specially prepared samples. The sandstone tutorial supplements laboratory experiences by duplicating the “microscope experience” as closely as possible while allowing students to explore and learn on their own.
Raising the Bar: Using Second Life in an Interdisciplinary Communication Course (2008)
Incorporating a Second Life component in an interdisciplinary communication course provides a challenging 3-D virtual world environment in which students can apply, test, repeat, adapt, and improve their use of communication strategies in ways that are quite simply beyond the reach of the physical boundaries of a classroom. With the creation in Second Life of virtual interactive models of low-income, green sustainable housing designs actually being piloted in East Austin, students greatly expanded their “reach” and shifted the instructor’s role, extending the standard for success of a semester-long team project.
Danteworlds: Purgatory and Paradise (2007)
This integrated multimedia environment combines artistic images, textual commentary, and audio effects to complement students’ reading and discussion of the Divine Comedy, enriching their experience of Dante’s poetic vision of his journey through the three realms of the afterlife where he meets many people and creatures. The site includes notes, a gallery of images, significant Italian verses, and study questions.
Building Mass and Energy Balances (BMEB): A Multi-Level Web-Based Educational Tool (2007)
This simulation provides tools for engineering students to explore modeling the physical world by manipulating components of mass and energy balances for indoor environments. By working with these two fundamental laws of conservation, students gain experience with applying principles used extensively in many engineering disciplines, using pre-defined real world scenarios, steady-state and mass balance calculators, and varying sets of parameters to address design issues related to mass balance and energy balance.
An Instructional Technology Scaffold for Reinforcing Learning of Probability and Statistics (2007)
This integrated lecture-lab environment is designed to support components of effective student learning, especially communication, content review, on-going feedback, and practice problem-solving. Emphasizing real-world applications of probability and statistics for an introductory biomedical engineering course, the approach integrates multiple instructional technologies, including BlackBoard®, hyperlinked PowerPoint® notes, Classroom Performance System (CPS) technology, and “real-world” MATLAB®-intensive problems.
The Learning Record (2007)
This evidence-based assessment tool provides the means to account for learning in ways more meaningful than through standardized testing, yet it is as consistent within and across student populations as conventional portfolio assessments. The record’s architecture allows instructors to use evidence such as interviews, observations over time, samples of students’ work, and interpretations of learning to afford a richer, more dynamic account of learning, whether used as the sole record of achievement or to support conventional grading.
The Daily Intelligencer: Critical Thinking and Methods of Interpretation (2007)
This learning environment helps students learn methods of gospel interpretation by allowing them to role play as “interns” for the fictional newspaper The Daily Intelligencer. By completing the three stages from applicant to intern to staff writer, students use writing to aid their learning about gospel analysis as they progress throughout the semester in the preparation of their final class paper.
French Verbs are Accessible! (2007)
This accessibility tool developed to take advantage of IBM’s Home Page Reader 3.04 software—originally designed for blind and low vision users—helps all French learners improve their listening and pronunciation skills, by reintegrating assistive technology into mainstream language instruction. The affordable PC software uses the IBM ViaVoice text-to-speech synthesizer to present information aloud as it appears on the computer screen.
Students explore French language and culture by following the lives of real UT students who have participated in the UT Summer Program in Lyon, France. Français Interactif emphasizes interaction and communication: student/teacher, student/student, student/computer, student/native-speaker. The goal of Français Interactif is in its title: interaction in French.
Pressure Volume Temperature Simulations (2004)
This PVT Simulation is a data-driven application that simulates the experience of using specialized laboratory equipment to take pressure, volume, and temperature measurements.
Flash-Based Tutorials in Drug Metabolism (2004)
Web-based tutorials that allow students to review basic metabolism concepts. Starting with complex chemical structures, students use clickable maps to identify functional groups present in the molecule, predict enzymes that would act on those functional groups, and predict the final products that would result from metabolism. The tutorials enhance the student's basic understanding of metabolic processes, which is necessary for a more thorough understanding of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics (i.e. what happens to a drug in the body and what pharmacological effects result).
Interactive Laboratory Modules: Methodological Approaches to the Study of Primate Anatomy and Locomotion (2004)
Students taking courses in physical anthropology, (particularly courses focusing on primate anatomy), are expected to understand the complex ways in which locomotor behaviors have shaped the primate musculoskeletal system through evolution. This CD contains interactive labs that allow students to learn basic functional concepts about locomotion, while also learning methods for collecting and analyzing locomotor data.
Virgil: An Interactive Tutorial for Writers (2004)
A wealth of online information to help students through the writing process. This resource mimics the question-and-answer style of a good consultation, focusing on the process of writing rather than a single assignment or a set of rules and makes writers feel like they were consulting a peer, rather than an authority figure.
Virtual Consumer Research Group Participant Panel (2004)
The online panel is an opt-in, informed consent, privacy-protected subject pool recruited for Web-based research. By definition, a research panel is a group of participants who have agreed to provide information at regular intervals over a period of time. The developers of this resource have integrated instructional technology, such as computers, enterprise-level software, and the Internet, to create a valuable educational tool for students and faculty.
Polaris: The Online Portfolio Center (2004)
A web-based tool for undergraduate engineering students that provides an environment to display and reflect on their accomplishments. With Polaris students can document their educational progress and share accomplishments with an audience. By using Polaris, students have a tool to record their course work, present projects, and evaluate their educational progress.
Multimedia Version of Masterworks of British Literature (2003)
An immersive environment for students that employs an interactive PowerPoint multimedia framework for period paintings, photographs and other images; sound clips and musical montages; and clips from videos and DVD’s to enrich lectures.
Danteworlds: Inferno (2003)
Provides an engaging multimedia learning experience for students, teachers, and general readers of Dante's poetic vision of Hell. The visual depiction of each infernal circle contains sidebar menus linking to explanatory notes, audio recordings of the famous Italian verses, study questions, and an extensive gallery of artistic images, many obtained from rare books in the Harry Ransom Center.
DigiMorph.org — A Digital Library of Vertebrate Morphology (2003)
A visual, interactive educational resource aimed at college students and researchers in the field of vertebrate morphology. DigiMorph presents 500-plus visualizations of the vertebrate skeleton in all its forms, from fossils to embryos and adults of living species, created with a high-resolution X-ray scanner.
Speech Disorders Clinical Archive (2003)
A tool designed to convey the complexity of human behavior as it is displayed in speech disorders, the videos within the collection are presented within an interactive user interface that illuminates, with real clients as examples, characteristics defining mild, moderate, and severe speech disorders in clients of different chronological ages.
