Students nominate faculty for new technology awards

Students from all Tufts campuses from March 1 to March 17 can nominate teachers that display innovative use of technology for the first ever 2012 Teaching with Technology Awards.

The awards are part of the Teaching with Technology Symposium to be held on May 23 and 24 at 55 Winthrop Street, Sheryl Barnes, assistant director of Educational & Scholarly Technology Services (ESTS) client services for University Information Technology (UIT), said.

The idea for the awards has been under discussion by the ESTS division of UIT for years, UIT's Senior Faculty Development Consultant Rebecca Sholes said in an email.

"It was only in the last year that we realized that the timing was right for the program and that we had the resources to make it happen," Sholes said.
 
To submit a nomination, students must complete an online form that asks them which school and course the instructor being nominated is involved in and why and how the instructor should be selected for the award.

UIT kept the nominating process simple to encourage as many nominations as possible, according to Director of Educational and Scholarly Technology Services Gina Siesing.

Student nominators also had their names entered in a raffle for a $100 Amazon.com gift card.

"Right now we have received nominations from all of the schools at Tufts so we're really excited about that," Barnes said.

There are also no specific requirements regarding technology use that nominees must meet, Siesing said.

"The term 'technology' really refers to any tool that an instructor is using in a course to support their teaching and enhance their students' learning," Sholes said.

Nominations can be based on instructors' use of tools like smart-boards, i-Clickers, YouTube videos and films, in addition to learning management systems like Trunk and the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase, Sholes said.

"The list could go on and on," she said.

The nominations are also not for any specific award categories, Barnes said.

"We decided to keep it relatively open-ended, so we'd have the flexibility to respond to whatever we got back in terms of nominations," she said.

Four to six winners are going to be selected by a committee comprised of faculty and students from all three campuses, Barnes said.

"We are now in the process of forming the committee and will be choosing people who play an important role in supporting teaching and learning across the university," Sholes said.

The judging criteria the committee will use are still being determined, Sholes said.

"We are hoping to have winners that represent the range of ways in which technology is being used to support student learning both inside and outside the classroom," Sholes said.

"We're going to look at them all in detail and try to come up with a fair set of criteria," Barnes added.

The Teaching with Technology Symposium is a re-work of a small, intensive three-day event that was called the Summer Institute, Barnes said.

"The new Symposium is really a much bigger two-day conference open to anybody who wants to come," she said.

Whereas the summer program consisted of about 15 pre-selected faculty members, Siesing said she anticipates the Symposium getting between 75 and 100 attendees.