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Congratulations To:
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René Izquierdo
for being awarded the
Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Endowed Teaching Chair. In recent years, Dr.
Izquierdo has become a leader in designing and developing online testing in
WebCT. He has conducted CT&D workshops on this topic and has
helped many of the faculty in our department enhance their WebCT test
items. But you may not be aware of some of his other activities.
o
Writer: His book Cristóbal de Llerena: primer dramaturgo
disidente de La Española, is scheduled to be released next summer (the
cover of which has been designed by Alberto Meza). We will need to have
a Departmental “book signing” celebration for this one.
o
Award
Nominee (for
two prestigious awards): the David
R. Pierce Award for Faculty Use of Technology in the Classroom, and to
the Innovator of the Year in the
Community College, an award from the League for Innovation.
o
Translator: René was the
translator for the Spanish version of Student Services Website for the
College (just released!) http://www.mdc.edu/espanol/
It is also available
from our main webpage. Just click on
the ñ.
·
Alicia García
for her second
Excellence Award! For those of you who missed the Excellence Award ceremony
and for those of you who were there and heard only half of what we had
submitted to be read as Alicia received this well-deserved award, here is
the rest of the accolade…..
o
Alicia García, the Academic Advisor, researcher, and recruitment
specialist in the ESL and Foreign Language Department, handles even the
most difficult situations efficiently, calmly, and professionally.
Working closely with the ESL and testing administrators, Alicia has helped
to change the policies and procedures that hindered student flow in the
department.
o
Alicia also represents the Department at important meetings and
recruitment events. Her professional demeanor, the breadth of her
knowledge, and her positive attitude are becoming well-known by other
departments and the requests for her participation on committees and for
special events are coming more frequently each term.
Update on
FIPSE eWriting Project
Thanks to Professors Sanjeev Agrawal, Francisco
Aguiar, Anna Chowaniec, Ana María Dieguez, M’Bike’ Featherstone, Michele
Fried, Ronald García, Lucas Katz, John Kolasinski, John Lopategui, Ronald
Loupus, Cointa Martin, Francisco Nieves, Janis Pérez, Luis Manuel
Rodríguez, Manual Santayana, Trevor Sessing, and Maria Stratos.
Thanks also to Tom Meyer and Ozzie Lopez for allowing your faculty to
participate in this important project!
The eWriting staff have been busy this term --
mostly at the InterAmerican Campus. The 18 professors at IAC,
Wolfson, and Kendall campuses (see above) are piloting levels 3 through 6
of the eWriting grant materials with just over 1200 students. As you
can imagine, the eWriting staff is kept very busy (you can find us here on
weekends now!) responding to requests, suggestions, and yes, even a “few”
complaints of the piloters. As we get this valuable feedback, we are
busy rewriting and enhancing some of the content, adding new lessons to
six, re-recording many of the multimedia presentations in all of the levels
that had problems with the sound, correcting errors in programming,
enhancing the feedback in the interactive activities, and revising the
testbanks. We have developed multimedia tutorials and training
packets to teach faculty and tutors to use the program and have conducted
training sessions with the help of CT&D trainers Chris DelVesco Cruz
and Rolando García.
This term, we have added two new features to the
eWriting program:
1) A new CPT prep component
(Reading/Writing/Math) has been developed by Marcia Cassidy, Cristi
Mitchel, Victor Sikah, and Glenna Veiga. It is currently being
programmed and will be available by summer. You might recognize most
of these names as the Kendall team who have been the CPT workshop leaders
for years at Kendall Campus. Their contributions to this project are
bound to be just what our students need to prepare them for success on the
Computerized Placement Test.
2) By popular demand, writing assignments
are being developed and added to the program. The authors are Marcia
Cassidy, Margaret Shippey, Maria Fallon, and Jane Stanley-McGrath.
The original design of eWriting did not include activities that would
involve teacher grading. Initially, eWriting was created to be a
self-directed/ auto-grading/ self-paced program. Faculty have
requested that “production activities” be added to help them assess
learning in the program. These new writing assignments will allow
students to create public (or private) e-portfolios that reflect and assess
their learning in the eWriting program.
Department
Business
Money FAQs
Did
you know that over the past 5 years, the department has acquired more than
2.5 million dollars in grants and special projects?
n $500,000 Lizz’s Dual
Participation Grant (Federal Grant from Dept. of Ed)
n $500,000 FIPSE
eWriting Grant (Federal Grant from Dept. of Ed)
n 1.4 million dollar lab
project (funded through a program development proposal)
n 25+K Reception area of
3212 (funded through a program development proposal)
n Faculty Learning
Initiative grants/ awards: Helen Roland (2 awards), Paula Sanchez (2
awards), Brad Stocker and Roy Schwab (1 award)
Need
Something Else?
Kendall
Faculty/staff, if you have any special projects that you would like to get
off the ground and need financial support for it, please let me know.
If you have a grant idea and would like to get it funded, let me know. And…
If there is anything you think we need in any of our areas, let me know
(equipment / personnel / services).
Cool
Technology WIKIs http://www.wiki.org
A Wiki is an online program that lets
anyone/everyone freely create, edit, share Webpages. If you are a
little frustrated with using SharePoint with colleagues or students for collaborative
writing, and a LOT frustrated with trying to find a way to easily
collaborate on writing projects in WebCT then this may be just what you
have been waiting for. It is a simple, password protected
collaborative writing and publishing environment.
My favorite Wiki so far is at http://www.writely.com --- it let’s you
publish directly to a blog when you have finished writing!
(Try it the next time you are writing a proposal
or report with colleagues at other campuses!)
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