2014 – ACTion

The Physiology of Teaching: Chris Perumalla’s Decade of Simplifying Complex Topics

For almost a decade, the Faculty of Medicine physiologist Dr. Chris Perumalla, has been using his passion as an educator and his desire to innovate to bring new teaching technology projects to life, both in the classroom, and out. Acknowledged widely for his work with UofT students, Chris Perumalla was a recipient of a 2013 […]

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Evolving From Wikis: Clare Brett’s Work Keeps Pace with Educational Technology Change

articles / Ken Kongkatong

From the idea of ‘cooperation without coordination’ arising from social sites such as GitHub to the events of the Arab Spring made possible by social media, today the concept of online collaboration seems to be commonplace if not overused. However, eight years ago, online collaboration was still in its infancy and considered be a novel

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Moving Microscopes Online

articles / Aaron Yellin

Microscopes are nothing if not a symbol of scientific progress. If someone is using a microscope, odds are they’re in the midst of some important work. And yet Mike Wiley, U of T anatomy professor, found that microscopes were a real hindrance for his first-year histology courses, which used them to study slides for organ

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Teaching with Video Games

articles / Aaron Yellin

The beginning of the millennium was a famous time for video gaming. Sony’s PS2 and Microsoft’s Xbox consoles signaled the final turn for gaming from rudimentary arcade stands to high-powered home machines. The most popular titles included classics like Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Madden NFL 2003, and Kingdom Hearts. But at the same time,

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Solving the Technological Learning Gap

articles / Aaron Yellin

If you’ve ever seen a mock-up drawing of what people in the past thought the future would look like—robot maids are usually involved—you know that technological advancement is hard to fully grasp. Sometimes, the best that real-world technology can offer is a bland placeholder (looking at you, vacuum cleaners) until further and more widespread innovation

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Holograms at the Intersection of Art and Science

articles / Aaron Yellin

If I told you that the practice of holography produces holograms, well, technically, I’d be right. But I’d lack the poetic flair of U of T Optical Sciences professor Emmanuel Istrate. He calls them holograms too naturally, but he also has another phrase — Windows with Memory. It’s the perfect sequence of words to cut

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Building Better Websites with ITIF

articles / Aaron Yellin

Sian Meikle has also been involved in two other projects with the Provost’s Instructional Technology Fund, expanding and improving the framework for some useful existing websites. The first, in 2006, was with the REED project—Records of Early English Drama. Their website, which Meikle originally helped build in 2003, contains a variety of information on the

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Bringing Library Resources to Blackboard

articles / Aaron Yellin

The Provost’s Instructional Technology Fund is supposed to be the gear that sets great ideas in motion, but sometimes its mere existence can spark a great idea in the first place.

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MyMedia: Developing U of T’s YouTube

articles / Aaron Yellin

Four years ago, the H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic made its way around Canada, approaching the University of Toronto just in time for the fall semester. With the possibility that thousands of students would be encouraged to stay home, the problem of how the afflicted would be able learn outside the classroom needed to be solved,

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A Better Way to Teach Art

articles / Aaron Yellin

It was 1998, and Gordon Belray, working for the Department of Art slide library, was given the incredibly tedious task of digitizing Professor Douglass Richardson’s Canadian architectural slide collection. Technically, he was moving U of T into the next century of teaching art and art history, where a few mouse clicks could replace the age-old

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