Winter Conference 2024

First-year students present unique challenges and opportunities. In this session Dr. Kuh will take a deeper dive into First Year HIPs and expand on their importance in setting up first-year students for success. 

George Kuh

Many believe that honors classes must be more challenging or contain more assignments than a standard class.  Honors education is something different.  It is about engaging the learners to explore topics in a deeper way that is more akin to problem-based learning.  This workshop will cover the hallmarks of honors education and allow the participants to brainstorm how they may convert a class or idea into an honors course.

Tracy Harbin

Faculty who are on track to earn continuing contract must put together a tenure portfolio as part of the process. This is a chance for faculty members to craft their narrative and make the case for earning continuing contract. During this presentation, faculty will receive practical tips and suggestions while learning about the desired formats for what their documentation should include. This workshop is geared towards faculty who will be under consideration for continuing contract in the next academic year.

Marwan Shaban, Sandy Keeter, and Van Quach

Join us for a Basic Spanish lesson tailored for faculty and staff. This interactive session will help you understand the basics of introducing yourself in Spanish and will act as an exploratory meeting to discuss the creation of an elementary Spanish class as professional development.

Sandra Alzate and Julian Vasquez

This presentation will provide faculty with an overview on how to use Perusall Social Annotation Software in online and in person courses. Participants will engage in a conversation about how to create discussions. This presentation will provide faculty with an overview on how to use Perusall Social Annotation Software in online and in person courses. Participants will engage in a conversation about how to create discussions that don't suck, how to engage students using videos, pdfs, textbook, podcasts, and more!

Michael Gennaro

This compelling presentation makes the case for higher education to incorporate AI skills into the curriculum. As generative AI stands to transform the economy, its impact reaches far and wide – with some jobs displaced but productivity and new roles surging. Educators must act now to ready students for an AI-powered workplace. Attendees will leave equipped with strategies to integrate AI into syllabi, assignments, and learning activities, empowering students to thrive in the 21st century job market. This visionary session provides the strategic understanding needed to adapt learning for an AI-fueled future.

Tim Mousel - NISOD, Lone Star College

Embark on a transformative seminar where we uncover ingenious strategies and tools to enhance confidence and efficiency on Canvas. Explore innovative techniques, apps, and extensions to streamline course management. Join us on a journey to discover invaluable shortcuts, revolutionizing your online teaching approach and elevating your overall experience with Canvas.

Richard Snyder

Join me for this brief session on ways that Seminole State's Learning and Development area can support faculty needs beyond current training programs.

Lisette Guillén-Dolby

While PDFs are no longer a recommended document format due to the difficulty of making them fully accessible, there may be cases where you absolutely have to use them. This workshop will cover common techniques for making your PDFs accessible, including how to use the Accessibility Checker and tag viewer. It is recommended you bring to the session one or more PDF files, along with the original file they were created from, if available.

Devin Monnens

In this session, you will hear from a contingent of faculty who will share their best practices as they relate to their adoption and use of OER materials. Gain an understanding of what is possible for you and your students if you go fully OER. This panel is in support of the SSC's new OER Program.

Stacy Tanner and Diana Reigelsperger

You can do this! Let's talk about how to get started. In this session Dr. Kuh will take a deeper dive into the important components of Service Learning as a HIP and discuss ways faculty can incorporate this high impact practice into their courses.  

George Kuh

Learn how to collaborate with faculty librarians to help co-create Lunchbrary + Nightbrary experiential learning extravaganzas in the library.  Develop High Impact Practices by intentionally fusing games, music, e-sports, performance, research, and the arts into a noisy bonanza for student success.  Partner with librarians and help make College Libraries the new campus hub for information, technology, instruction, and student engagement. Become a Nightbrarian.

Jason Anfinsen

**For in-person and online modalities!** Ever get antsy when students take a long time to copy information from your lecture? Want to move faster but allow students to still get all the information? Wishing you had more time in class for students to actually engage in your material, but you don’t want to flip your classroom? Want to provide more structure for your online course? Guided Notes are a great way to streamline your course, especially for subjects involving practice problems, examples or 2D visuals! Plus, it’s easy to adapt your current lectures to this format without having to change much. There are so many ways to make this method work for you and your style, whether you teach in person or online! Come and explore how Guided Notes can transform your student learning and classroom engagement. *NEW: Using Guided Notes for Pre-Class/Flipping, and how to make your Guided Notes Accessible*.

Justine Monsalve

Join us to learn how utilizing Navigate can help transform the student experience through progress surveys, early alerts, texting, academic planning, registration and appointment scheduling. Navigate correlates well with Seminole State’s 2025 Strategic Plan, aligning with several strategic goals and strategies. Navigate will serve as the vehicle or catalyst that will facilitate the implementation of a comprehensive guided pathways framework to easily engage with students in a proactive, individualized and holistic manner. As such, the implementation of this student success management system is a collegewide effort involving multiple departments and benefiting everyone from students to administrators. Everyone involved will have access to tools and features that provide smart guidance to keep students on the pathway to completing courses and earning credentials.

Lisa Valentino and Max Arb

Student Comments in SPOIs represent a source of valuable feedback on the perception of the quality of instruction. As instructors, we read these comments every semester but can lose sight of long-term trends. We will explore the use of semantic analysis for identifying the overall sentiment of teaching and dive deeper into identifying trends across semesters. We will compare results from Chatgtp with methods from Python’s NLTK Library.

Joseph Wilda

Generative models like ChatGPT make it tempting for students to shortcut assignments rather than grappling with material. In this insightful presentation, learn effective strategies to thoughtfully integrate ChatGPT into your curriculum.

Discover how to craft engaging assignments resilient to AI shortcuts. We’ll explore rubrics, checklists and principles to deter rote responses and over-reliance on AI, while promoting critical thinking and academic integrity. Gain insights on the challenges and opportunities of AI in education, along with actionable methods to inspire students’ creativity.

Tim Mousel - NISOD, Lone Star College

Now that we understand what AI is and some platforms we can use, let's look at practical ways educators can apply AI in the classroom. This talk will focus on real-life examples of how educators can harness AI to build lesson plans, activities, quizzes, tests, and rubrics. We'll explore how AI can help create customized learning materials, assessments, and rubrics tailored to each educator's needs.

Jaime Magnetico-Walsh

Have you ever wondered what percentage of our students turn in assignments on the last day? Do older students have fewer missed assignments? Is there a correlation between time spent logged in to Canvas and positive course outcomes? Several faculty members have generously allowed us to examine data from their courses. Join us for the answers to the above questions and more. Recommended for: Techies, data junkies or anyone who is naturally inquisitive.

Marwan Shaban, Craig Tidwell, Adam Stark, Tom Hoke, and Payal Brahmbhatt

The Humanities Department will share experiences and course lessons from their recent NEH trip to the Charleston area. They studied Gullah Geechee culture & history, enslaved peoples' lives, and the contents of the new International African American Museum. Come learn how they are integrating this into course content for our students!!

K. Steinhaus, C. Menninger,S. Tanner, D. Reigelsperger,S. Alzate, J. Vazquez, J.C. Carandang, M. Gennaro,R. Braaten, K. Beers, and T. Tomengo

At Convocation we got to discuss metacognition and I introduced how to assess for it. In this session we will pick up where we left off with assessment. We will discuss ways to assess students' metacognitive knowledge and how to use those results to plan engaging activities that explicitly teach metacognitive skills. We will focus on and use the 6 strategies for effective learning: spaced practice, interleaving, retrieval practice, elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding.

Carole Brown

This session will review the most common accessibility problems in Word and PowerPoint and will show faculty how to remediate them. Faculty will learn how to use the accessibility checkers in Word, PowerPoint, and Panorama. Panorama can be used to remediate Word and PowerPoint files too.

Marisabel Irizarry

From "Shaking Your Groove Thing" to "I Will Survive," join us and walk in place for up to 2 miles in 45 minutes! We will listen to great music with a little history while having fun and getting into shape with friends! We will safely be adding some twists, leg lifts, side-to-side kicks and more -- you won't believe how much you can walk. Stay at one speed or move it up a notch, whatever works for you!

Debbie Elrod

Undergraduate research can help students build confidence and explore their interests and strengths. In this session Dr. Kuh will take a deeper dive into the important components of Undergraduate Research as a HIP and discuss how faculty can incorporate this high impact practice into their courses.  

George Kuh

Understanding how to serve the military student population is the best way to recruit, retain, and graduate this diverse student population. Active-duty service members and student veterans bring valuable insight and can enhance classroom discussions with their unique experiences and perspectives.

Kathryn Lee-Hunt

This presentation will provide participants with an overview of significant legislation passed during the 2023 session of the Florida legislature. Participants will understand the scope of the new legislation and the anticipated impact it will have on the college and higher education in the State.

Paul Carland

This is an introductory meeting tailored for college faculty and staff with a command of Spanish. This is your chance to practice and enhance your language skills in a relaxed, conversational setting. Explore diverse topics, share experiences, and connect with like-minded colleagues. If there is enough interest, the club will become a regular opportunity for language enrichment and professional development.

Sandra Alzate and Julian Vasquez

If you are new to Canvas or looking to improve your Canvas experience, please join us. We will be exploring a Canvas course through the eyes of a student and sharing some of the adjustments we make in the background before classes start. Topics will include settings, the gradebook, and some other gems. We want everyone off to a good start at the beginning of every semester!

Julie Edstrom and Olga Parsons

Learn techniques for effectively framing prompts for ChatGPT and DALL-E in this hands-on presentation. Master prompting best practices to shape tone, facts usage, and more. Gain insights on custom instructions for reliable performance, plus principles behind quality text-image pairs. Depart with actionable strategies for instructing AI models ethically across diverse applications. Join us to advance your fluency in our AI-powered future. 

Tim Mousel - NISOD, Lone Star College

This presentation will explore the opportunities and challenges of generative technology, commonly referred to as AI. Academic honesty, ethics, cultural literacy, content production tools, and workforce readiness will be among the topics discussed. The presenter will demonstrate OpenAI and Canva tools, and additional resources on these topics will be provided. (This description was written with the assistance of generative technology.)

Diana Reigelsperger

Come learn about some newly acquired streaming film resources available through the library, providing access to over 13,000 documentary and feature films!   A great way to complement the content in your courses, whether online or in person!    

Morgan Tracy

Join us for an engaging training session designed to equip faculty members with the knowledge and skills needed to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for creating compelling and personalized content in their online courses.

Sam Kelly

In this session we will discuss metacognitive regulation. The focus is on how to help students who are learning how to learn discipline-specific content set goals for learning then plan, monitor, problem-solve, and evaluate their progress. How do we help them monitor and course correct during learning?

Carole Brown

Learn about the definition and benefits of a vegan lifestyle at this health information conversation/workshop. Recognize plant-based literacy techniques to promote health, improve whole wellness, and positively impact your school, community, and planet. Identify strategies for efficiently locating, evaluating, and using needed health information from credible sources. Increase a healthy stock of knowledge through hands-on research to recognize vegan products and boost financial, environmental, and digital literacies. Vegans, veg-curious, and meat-lovers are all welcome.

Jason Anfinsen

In this session, faculty will be introduced to Seminole State's OER program called, "Beyond the Textbook," which is a collaborative effort among the staff of the FCTL, the Library, and those in E-learning to support faculty interested in developing OER courses. Attend this session to learn about the application process and the details of the program. The first cohort of this program will begin work in late January.    

Stacy Tanner, Ross Martin, and Ryan Wilcox