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IT and You

The emergence and evolution of new communication technologies presents you, as a Carolina teacher, with exciting opportunities and formidable challenges in achieving the learning goals you craft for your students. To engage in teaching with different technologies, you may need to think about a whole range of questions: What kinds of technologies can you use at UNC? Which of these technologies would best serve you and your students? Which technologies are you comfortable with? How will instructional technologies fit into your responsibilities as a teacher and the responsibilities of your students as learners? Whether you're an enthusiastic, accomplished technophile or a reluctant, skeptical technophobe, an informed perspective on teaching with technology calls for thinking about yourself, about your students, and about the content, process, and environment of your teaching.

To help focus your efforts and save time when you work with teaching technologies, you will want to consider your response to the following questions:

• What are my expectations for the knowledge and thinking skills I want my students to acquire in this course and curriculum?
  
• How will I organize and structure the course to enhance student success? What teaching strategies are best suited to encourage and facilitate the learning I want to occur? Which teaching approaches will I be comfortable with?
  
• What technologies might enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of my strategies and which of these can I be comfortable with as a teacher?
  
• What skills, knowledge, and technical resources do I need, and where can I find them, in order to take advantage of these new technological tools?
  
• In what ways should I change my teaching if I am to plan and teach a course on-line? How will I adapt?

This sourcebook is designed to help you explore these questions while encouraging you to make connections between teaching and learning needs and specific instructional technologies. Each section describes an important task you may need to undertake as a teacher and lists a number of specific IT tools or resources that may be most helpful for this task.

Two instructional support units at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill work together to help you learn more about different IT tools and examine questions you might be considering about your teaching and technology, regardless of your departmental or school affiliation:

The Center for Teaching and Learning has consultants who will meet with you individually to help you organize and plan your teaching, find or create teaching tools to facilitate the teaching strategies you choose, and determine where and when teaching technologies may present new possibilities in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of your teaching.

Center for Teaching and Learning
316 Wilson Library
Campus Box 3470
Tel 919-966-1289 | Fax: 919-962-5236
ctl.unc.edu

The ITS Center for Instructional Technology will help you access the technical resources necessary to succeed with instructional technologies once you have decided to employ one or more of them in your course, or you are thinking about doing so. CIT staff are constantly monitoring the quickly evolving repertoire of instructional technologies so they can be sensitive to new opportunities that may arise in the application of these technologies in UNC classes.

Center for Instructional Technology, ITS Teaching and Learning Division
Campus Box 3450
Tel 919-962-6042 | Fax 919-962-0784
Map of locations
www.unc.edu/cit

Whenever possible, these two organizations work together to assure you of responsive, informed support in the consideration, and application of instructional technologies in your teaching at the University. If you can't find what you're looking for, call us. If we don't know the answers, we'll try to help you find them.

You may also wish to explore on-line resources to investigate specific instructional technologies at Carolina. Three great places to start your search are:

my.unc.edu
the UNC portal, which includes a Teaching at Carolina section under “My Day”

help.unc.edu
a search engine and database maintained by Information Technology Services (ITS) that enables you to search for services and documents relating to information technology

Finally, you might have specialized IT support available to you within your school or department. Check out the “Finding IT Resources in Your School or Department" section for more information.

We hope that you find this handbook useful as both a source of ideas for teaching with IT, and as a guide to focus your investigation of specific IT tools. You may want to refer to this handbook during the early stages of planning for student learning, as well as when you are actively engaged with teaching your courses.

next section: Arranging Classroom Facilities

Contact Us
email: itconnections@unc.edu
CTL: Tel 919-966-1289 | Fax: 919-962-5236
CIT: Tel 919-962-6042 | Fax 919-962-0784