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Featured Faculty - March 2007

John Bartelt, Ph.D.
College of Education and Organizational Leadership (CEOL)
Associate Professor Education-Technology

Dr John Bartelt demonstrated three applications which he has found effective for instruction. Camtasia, CrazyTalk, and Qwizdom were presented at the spring 2006 Faculty Showcase sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Dr. Bartelt has created a series of tutorials with Camtasia so that students can review the information, especially if they have missed a lecture. Camtasia is an application that records and edits audio, video and screen captures for training, and presentations.

Dr. Bartelt originally introduced CrazyTalk to ULV as a supplement for his lectures to animate digital pictures with speech. CrazyTalk is a powerful "morphing" animation application that allows you to bring photos to life. Dr. Bartelt feels that these animations bring a little more into the lecture. "If Aristotle could actually talk to you for just thirty seconds and tell you something that's going to back up a lecture, it sort of personalizes it a little bit more." He uses this technology to enhance his PowerPoint lectures, especially when talking about a particular theorist, or people through history. With his skills in the use of technology and acting ability he has created a unique host of interesting and entertaining characters that brings his lectures to life.

Qwizdom is a remote control audience response interactive system used by Dr. Bartelt to test his students' understanding of the material presented in a lecture. After a certain amount of lecture material is presented he will stop and have his students play Qwizdom. His students have expressed a positive experience and look forward to playing the challenging games programmed in the system.

Dr. Bartelt states that these devices are just tools, and "they are not the answer to anything, the answer is in the content of what you do and how you do it, and how fun it is for the learner." He continued by emphasizing that these are just a few tools that you can add to your arsenal, and the more you can play with these tools the more interesting it can be, and the more interesting something is the more people learn.