New Tools in New Ways

Congratulations to one of our favorite iTech Fellows, Kim Davenport, who was recently awarded the CMS Instructional Technology Initiative Award by the prestigious College Music Society. 

CMS is a consortium of college, conservatory, university, and independent musicians and scholars of music. This annual award is given in recognition of exceptional contributions in  the effective use of technology to improve college music instruction. 

Kim’s work will be recognized at the Society’s National Conference and presented in a Showcase event there.

Take a look at Kim's rich story-telling of how she teaches her "TARTS 2220: Exploring Classical Music in Our Community" to engage students and help them fearlessly learn more about music. It helped us better understand why students love her online course.

Kim's story of TARTS220 is told via use of the open, free web tool ReadFold. Check that out too as a way to easily engage students in telling their own stories with rich media links and resources.

Gorgeous. Inspiring. And fun!

Start the new year right: REFWORKS! 2.0!

It's been confusing and disappointing in the past that UW would spend so much to join the wave of universities purchasing and offering RefWorks FOR FREE to their students, and then not promote the tool. Mention RefWorks to most students and you get a blank look. Add the challenge that it takes a bit of time to learn to use it on your own, without support or promotion, and even those that heard about it found it challenging to start up. But those that do? So much time and effort saved, excellence and error-free citations gained.

Now, a new year, a new plea from Academic Technologies: hop in, the water's lovely and the UW Libraries have stepped to the plate with a new RefWorks support site! Check it out. Still a bit complicated, and we strongly recommend you stop in the Library, if possible, and ask a Librarian to get you started. If you do, you'll soon be spinning with joy seeing how easy it is to build your own personal library of citations.

Even if they don't offer to show you, DEMAND they teach you how to add Google Scholar citations straight to your library. We strongly recommend you also use the free paper writing tool Write-N-Cite, Learn that in Phase II, once you're a RefWorks addict.

Here's the new UW RefWorks site. 

You're welcome.