Communication and Technology Report

Communication & Technology Update by Lynne Wiesman, Director of Communication & Technology tech@cit-asl.org

Now that I have completed my first term, I have a better sense of my role and the needs related to communication and technology. I’m excited to announce a number of initiatives all springing from survey results and membership direction.
I’m happy to report a very active and extremely competent C&T Committee. Members of the new committee are: Windell (Wink) Smith, Samond Bishara, Holly Nelson, and David Evans. Each member brings a specific expertise and interest to this committee. A big thanks to VRSii & Sorenson for providing Fuze Meeting for our first C&T Committee meeting! Please contact any of the C&T Committee for input toward communication & technology initiatives that would better serve you and improve your teaching!
From that initial meeting, we each came away with work and goals to better serve the membership and are making plans for the upcoming conference in 2014 in Portland, Oregon. We are pleased to be working toward a number of exciting conference plans including:

• A dedicated Technology Topics Track providing hands-on training and presentations on various technological devices, applications, software, etc. to enhance our teaching of ASL and interpreting. To give you an idea, just a few of the topics we are working toward are:
  • A “How To” track for
    • editing video (Final Cut, iMovie, etc.)
    • using YouTube, vimeo, etc.
    • cloud servers (dropbox, box.com, etc.)
    • developing multimedia presentations (Powerpoint, Prezi, etc.)
    • providing video feedback (ELAN, GoReact, etc.)
    • using collaborative documents & project management (wikis, googledocs, ASANA, etc.)
    • Online portfolios (jobrary.com, livebinders, etc.)
    • Text voting
  • Distance Education technology such as Blackboard, Moodle, etc.
  • Apps for Android and iPhone products
  • Video conferencing (Fuze, Go to Meeting, etc.)
• Clicker voting – voting with smart phones or some technology (including distance participation)
• Streaming of plenaries and at least one track of the conference
• Green Conference leveraging technologies & reducing waste
• Live blogging & Vlogging
• Increased video presence of all materials on website

If you have any other communication or technology topics or initiatives you would like to see us tackle or you have specific expertise in utilizing technology in the classroom that you’d like to share, please email tech@cit-asl.org and let us know. Additionally, please take a few minutes to respond to a brief confidential survey so that we might better assess the needs for communication & technology of our membership:
Click here to fill out the survey. (This is the same survey on the Seeking Your Input page.) Please only fill it out once.
Special thanks to Windell “Wink” Smith for creating the ASL version of the survey on a very short timeline. Greatly appreciated.