Raspberry Pi Potential
Awarded to: John Chrispell, Francisco Alarcon, Tim Flowers, Charles Lamb, Dan Radelet, and Ed Donley
"The Raspberry Pi potential project was focused on exploring the use of Raspberry Pi units when teaching mathematics. The units were seen to be easily programmable. The base operating system on the unit has a wide range of tools for introducing students to programming, algorithms, and scientific computing. The units could provide a secondary computing environment (supplementing Windows) and high performance computing gateway, exposure to which may prove very beneficial to IUP graduates."
Issues and Ideas in Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum
Awarded to: Bryna Siegel Finer, Gary Stoudt, Christoph Maier, Jean Neinkamp, Gloria Park, Jason Long, Nathan Lindbert, David Parrot, Gail Sechrist
"The main purpose of our teaching circle is discussion of issues and ideas about writing in our own classes. To support that discussion, we read widely in WAC scholarship and pedagogical resources. Everyday Genres is a book that is one of the most current WAC/WID texts and is highly recommended in the WAC community; the mini-grant enabled us to buy copies and read it as relevant throughout the year to inform our classroom practice as well as enrich our disucssions during our meetings. We also were able to purchase some copies of Writing Without Borders and have a screening for our members. The documentary highlights pedagogical ideas and strategies employed in accommodating English as an Additional Language (EAL) students in our writing courses. I think we all found this to be a productive use of time and it also spurred a lot of interesting conversations."
Facilitating a Student and Faculty Research Collaboration Community: Utilization of Physical and Virtual Environments at IUP
Awarded to: Crystal Machado, Courtney McLaughlin, Lilian Mina
"The goals of the IUP Writing Buddy Teaching Circle were to 1) increase professional productivity and 2) increase cross-disciplinary collaboration. To achieve both of these goals, the teaching circle developed a Facebook Writing Buddy Group page to facilitate virtual and physical meetings, which are used to engage in professional writing activities. The grant was used to fund dissemination of information to the professional community. Drs. Crystal H. M. Machado and Courtney L. McLaughlin and Ms. Lilian Mina, members from the IUP Writing Buddy Teaching Circle, collaborated on an interdisciplinary presentation that was presented by Dr. Crystal Machado at the 24th International Conference on College Teaching and Learning in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL (April 8-12, 2013)."
The Development of Mentoring Materials for Doctoral Students and New Doctoral Faculty: Guides to Doctoral Culture and Pedagogy
Awarded to: Tanya Heflin, Kelli Jo Kerry-Moran, James Lenze, Crystal Machado, Dante Mancini, Kelli Reefer Paquette, Jennifer Rotigel
"The Doctoral Teaching Circle, whose membership includes an interdisciplinary group of faculty from the departments of Communications Media, English, Professional Studies in Education, and Psychology was awarded a mini-grant first to identify resources for mentoring graduate students at the doctoral level and then to develop a practical guide based on these materials. The grant purchased 14 electronic books, which members of the group reviewed individually. The circle as a whole then consolidated the best material from these resources to create a pragmatic mentoring guide entitled Best Practice Tips for Doctoral Students, which will be made available to directors of the doctoral programs across the IUP campus."
Belonging, Learning, and Exploring New Directions (BLEND) Teaching Circle, Faculty and Students of Color: Creating the Perfect BLEND at IUP
Awarded to: Crystal Machado, Shirley Johnson, Jason Smith, Bitna Kim, Jin Su, Shijuan Liu
"Multicultural group formation continues to be a contemporary challenge in higher education across the nation (Sarker, Davis & Tiropanis, 2010). Social mistrust still pervades the hearts and minds of many (Mohanty, 2010). Members of majority groups worry about appearing to be prejudiced, while members of minority groups worry about being targeted by prejudice (Sorensen, Nagda, Gurin, & Maxwell, 2009). BLEND was established to provide a safe space where faculty and students of color can receive guidance, support, and constructive feedback that honors their differences and builds on their members of BLEND recruited additional members, crafted a mission statement, and developed a recruitment plan to identify IUP mentors who could mentor new faculty and students of color. BLEND will launch its mentoring program in fall 2013."
Bar Coded Medication Administration Safety: A time to study to measure safe and time efficient medication administration among upper level nursing students using simulation, bar coded medication administration scanners, and time tracking software
Awarded to: Terri L. Calderone and Lisa Palmer
"We requested a mini-grant so that we could purchase 2 iPod Touch devices for use with an App called nuVizz Time Study. The iPods give us the ability to use the App so that we can observe, time and record the various steps it takes in giving a medication. We want to study how long it takes for senior nursing students to accurately administer medications using bar coded scanners in our simulation lab. Our achievements to date include: IRB approval for a needs assessment survey, completing this survey this spring term, customizing the App for the time study, and then practicing the use of the App. We are currently analyzing our survey results and plan to conduct the study with nursing students this summer. Our research interest is to study safe and timely medication administration practices among nursing students."