The Rocket

Issue date: 10/19/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Charise Lutz Brian Danielson, an instructional design specialist, informed faculty and students about Blackboard updates during the Teaching and Learning Technology Roundtable presentation Thursday in Morrow Field House. [Click to enlarge]

An organization known as the Teaching and Learning Technology Roundtable has been helping the university integrate technology to aid in student education.

"What we want to do is promote technology in a teaching environment," said Abigail Amissah-Arthur, the first year co-convener for the TLTR.

Although the TLTR has been active for years, because technology is constantly changing, the organization strives to ensure that the university's technology remains up to date.

"For a long time, Slippery Rock University was ahead of the technology curve," said Leighann Forbes, the second year co-convener for the TLTR. "In recent years, I believe we have fallen behind."

The organization provides Group Project grants (campus wide), individual, or Professional Development grants on an approximate $14,000 budget.

Grant requests are evaluated by examining the legitimacy of the request and the impact that a potential grant would have on student education.

In addition to accepting grant requests from faculty, the TLTR has organized several task forces that perform on many levels to ensure proper use of technology on campus. These include the Grant Initiative task force, the Technology and Information Literacy task force, which evaluates student proficiency with technology, and the Distance Education task force, which studies how distance education can be used on the SRU campus.

Additional task forces include the Web Page task force, the Blackboard task force, the Plagiarism task force, the Citrix task force, and the Mobile Computing task force.

Though the TLTR acknowledges the usefulness of several on-campus technological benefits, it still seeks to improve upon existing systems."We are very disappointed with the wireless accessibility on campus," Forbes said. "We understand it probably won't be everywhere, but we would like to see it in more buildings."

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