I had the great privilege of being invited to talk to the faculty of the Justice Institute in Victoria last week and speak with them about a few of the projects I have been working on with our faculty at Camosun this year. The talk focused on some practical ways faculty at Camosun have integrated technology in their class to solve specific problems or achieve specific pedagogically based outcomes, hence the “peer to peer” part of the title with me acting as the proxy for our faculty (although they did have a direct voice as I interviewed a couple of them about their projects).

The faculty and projects I picked used Skype, Twitter, YouTube and Posterous as the tools. Scope of the projects ranged from fairly small and discrete (using Skype to bring in a virtual guest speaker) to fairly ambitious (using YouTube as a platform for student created video projects, which involved 5 sections of Nursing students).

This was the first time I used Prezi as a presentation tool and enjoyed having a reason to use it. Before doing the presentation, I tweeted out asking for potential gotcha’s on using Prezi and got some good tips back, including to go easy on the zoom and pan as it can be nausea inducing on the big screen to have things continually spinning and flying from corner to corner, and to download a hard copy of the Prezi to my local machine along with any external resources I might have embedded in the Prezi, like YouTube videos. The one tip I can add to that from my own experience is to test the presentation on a projector beforehand as the projector will tend to lower the screen resolution and could change your layout when displayed on the big screen as a result. I noticed that spacing of my text was altered from the widescreen view I had on my laptop to the narrow projector view when plugged into the overhead projector.