Teaching With Technology
A Partner for Your Course
Working with the Digital Learning Lab means gaining a pedagogical partner for your course. In our collaborations with faculty, we offer a range of resources to help scaffold instructional goals.
Offering a multimedia-focused classroom space, versatile support structure, and customized online tools, McGraw’s Digital Learning Lab presents a unique opportunity to explore and experiment with digital pedagogy. The DLL is staffed by McGraw’s Educational Technology group and founded on the idea that good technologies for teaching and learning are rooted in the same principles as all sound pedagogy – encouraging creativity, exploration, discovery, and collaboration.
Building Digital Assignments
Instructors are welcome to meet with us early in the semester to design a strategy to support their vision for the course. Our specialists can help you develop a digital assignment that challenges your students in novel ways while achieving the pedagogical goals you have for your students. We support all sorts of multi-modal projects including video production and editing, audio recording/podcasting, digital mapping and timelines, and collaborative course blogs. Even if you don’t have experience with a particular set of tools, we can make sure that your students have the skills and knowledge they need to succeed. Faculty are welcome to teach in the DLL, or they may partner with DLL staff to build an interactive session led by a digital media specialist.
A Lab for Teaching and Learning
Students can utilize the DLL space and its resources to complete their digital assignments. During our operating hours, students can stop by for help, advice, and troubleshooting. The DLL maintains a staff student specialists, each with tutoring experience and expertise in various multimedia workflows, who are available for questions or consultations outside of normal business hours.
Outside of class sessions, the DLL is a student-centric space where campus communities are encouraged to engage in dialogues around digital tools and creative processes. In addition to a student-led DLL multimedia workshop series each semester, students reserve the DLL for competitions, club gatherings, k-12 outreach, study sessions, and workshops.
Tools and Custom Platforms
In addition to the resources contained within our physical space in the Digital Learning Lab, the Educational and Classroom Technologies group also works with faculty to integrate existing tools or, when necessary, develop new tools to address teaching goals.
We maintain and develop a wide range of platforms for teaching and leaning, such as blogs, wikis, and media curation tools on the McGraw Commons platform. With blogs and other collaborative digital environments, we can help you build a community that extends beyond the walls of the classroom. Recent projects include course blogs for traveling journalism classes, video annotation tools for collaborative analysis of films, and course sites for shared reading responses.
For those faculty members who may be interested in developing custom teaching tools, the 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education may be a helpful resource. The Digital Learning Lab often collaborates with recipients of this fund to plan and develop the technology aspects of their proposals, but an award is not required to collaborate with the Digital Learning Lab or with the McGraw Center.
