Current Project Descriptions

2007 Vision Awards

"Students as Historians" Web Project

Faculty Members: Anthony Brown

Department: Curriculum and Instruction

Project Description: This project illustrates how various people, events, and institutions have been excluded, misrepresented and/or over-generalized in the formal curriculum. Students create a web-based visual, historical narrative that presents multiple perspectives and prompts others, through document-based questions, to engage in historical reasoning. The Students as Historians website showcases the students' projects and provides resources for teachers and curriculum developers interested in using the projects in their classrooms.

Sociocultural Influences Case-Based Video Website

Faculty Members: Keffrelyn Brown

Department: Curriculum and Instruction

Project Description: This website showcases case-based video projects created by students in ALD 327 Sociocultural Influences in Learning. Their video projects narrate a situation that illustrates key terms and concepts related to sociocultural factors (e.g., race, social class, gender, sexuality) and schooling.

Team Sports Skills Demonstration Videos

Faculty Members: Amanda Gammage

Department: Kinesiology and Health Education

Project Description: Teacher certification students in Kinesiology 219T prepare a short video of themselves teaching a skill from one of the five team sports that are focused on in this class. Grading points include the proper introduction of the skill, cues, and demonstrations, as well as the ability to use the video camera and iMovie editing tools. These instructional videos are now available on the web for viewing by students and others interested in teaching these sports.

Using PDAs for Fitness Testing

Faculty Members: Phil Stanforth

Department: Kinesiology and Health Education

Project Description: About ninety students each year learn to conduct fitness evaluations as part of KIN 352K Diagnosis and Fitness. The goal of this project is to develop a system for using PDAs to conduct Posture and Movement screens. These screens have traditionally been conducted using pencil and paper. Recording this data directly to a PDA and then uploading it to a database will eliminate recording errors and allow advanced processing of the data.

Enhancements to STELLAR Literacy Tutoring Website (2006 Vision Award project)

Faculty Members: James Hoffman

Department: Curriculum and Instruction

Project Description: The Supportive Technology for the Education of Literacy Learners and Reading (STELLAR) website offers a highly interactive environment designed to develop effective teaching skills in the area of literacy education using a tutorial setting. The guides and videos are based on an understanding of effective teaching as responsive to the interests and needs of the learner. Instruction builds from the known to the new, extending into new levels of literacy activity. This Vision Award project provides additional tutorial videos.

Technology Standards, Integration, and Assessment Online Training Using RAT Framework

Faculty Members: Joan Hughes

Department: Curriculum and Instruction

Project Description: The Replacement, Amplification, Transformation (RAT) online assessment modules lead learners through a series of online and offline activities that acquaint them to the concept of the National Educational Technology Standards, "technology integration," technology integration assessment, and then RAT.

Audio Captioning for "Alien Rescue"

Faculty Members: Min Liu

Department: Curriculum and Instruction

Project Description: This Vision Award project adds audio captioning to Alien Rescue, an innovative and award-winning multimedia program. Currently, Alien Rescue is being used as part of science curriculum in may schools in Texas as well as schools in eight other states, and two foreign countries. Research studies have shown students' science knowledge and problem-solving skills have significantly increased, and their attitude toward science has been enhanced as a result of using Alien Rescue. The audio captioning benefits all students, specifically poor readers, ESL, and bilingual students in Texas and nationwide.

Legacy Cycle Development and Display Website

Faculty Members: Anthony Petrosino

Department: Curriculum and Instruction

Project Description: The Legacy Cycle uses challenges as anchors for learning. The challenges are designed to create an increasing depth of knowledge in a specific subject, with each challenge presented as one cycle of the Legacy shell. The combination of well-designed challenges and meaningful learning activities provides a rich environment for both the students and the instructor. This project provides a web-based environment through which students can quickly and easily create and share online Legacy Cycle challenges without becoming bogged down with the technology of web-development.

Handheld Active Learning in Statistical Instruction

Faculty Members: Daniel H. Robinson and Brandon Vaughn

Department: Educational Psychology

Project Description: Students often consider Statistics the "worst" course they take. As an alternative to traditional lectures, in which students passively learn, this project provides interactive hands-on statistics tutorials on handheld devices. The tutorials focus on direct manipulation of data and visual aspects of introductory statistics. Students are able to interact with the graphs, data, and concepts, making changes dynamically and seeing the results of their modifications.

R Statistical Language Tutorial Videos

Faculty Members: Brandon Vaughn

Department: Educational Psychology

Project Description: Popular statistical software is costly, making it difficult for educators to obtain and use. The statistical language R is freely available for PCs and Macs, however, has a command-based rather than "point & click" user interface. To help with the ease-of-use issues, this project provides short tutorial videos that help educators and students get started using the R language to perform a variety of common statistical functions.