Advanced Technological Education · December 2012

Welcome to the ATE Central Connection! Published the first Monday of each month, the ATE Central Connection is meant to disseminate information to and about ATE centers and projects, providing you with up-to-date ATE news, events, reminders, as well as highlighting new centers, projects, and resources. In addition, we will also highlight an educational topic with complementary resources found within ATE Central to help illustrate how ATE resources can be used in the classroom.

We want the ATE Central Connection to be a valuable tool; please e-mail info@atecentral.net with any suggestions about how to make the ATE Central Connection more useful for you or to suggest any information you would like to see in an upcoming issue.

Upcoming Events

December 7	Global Education & Technology	Online
December 7–8	VHDL & FPGA Design Workshop	Chicago, IL
December 12	New "Proven Practices" on Women and STEM Webinar	Online
December 14	ACE Webinar: Behavior System & Integration Workshop	Online
December 14	NACK Webinar - Societal and Ethical Issues in Nanotechnology - Part II	Online
December 17–21	Security +	Palos Hills, IL
December 19–20	NETLAB+ User Community Workshop	Jacksonville, FL
January 2–4	SCME Pressure Sensor Cleanroom Workshop	Tampa, FL
January 3–4	Winter 2013 ICT Educator Conference	San Francisco, CA
January 3–5	25th Annual CSU Biotechnology Symposium	Anaheim, CA
January 4–7	Create Renewable Energy Workshops	San Luis Obispo, CA
January 5–9	American Association of Physics Teachers Winter Meeting 2013	New Orleans, LA
January 7–11	FELI in Monterey Bay	Salinas, CA
January 7–11	Information Storage and Management	Palos Hills, IL
January 9–12	ASTE 2013 International Conference	Charleston, SC
January 14–18	VMware vSphere: Install, Configure & Manage	Palos Hills, IL
January 16	EvaluATE Webinar: Developing Questions for Effective Surveys	Online
January 17	Private POGIL Workshop at Gallaudet University	Washington, DC
January 18	1-Day Private POGIL Workshop for Independent Schools Association of the Central States (ISACS)	Chicago, IL
January 25	NACK Webinar - (Three Part Series) Trends in Nano: Technology	Online
January 28–31	Florida Educational Technology Conference	Orlando, FL
January 31	Digital Fab Lab Community (DFLC) - STEM Guitar Workshop
February 8	NetWorks Webinar: Technology Program Review & Recommendations - Evaluating Programs	Online
February 15	NetWorks Webinar: Technology Program Review & Recommendations - Surviving Program Review	Online
February 22	NACK Webinar - Nanotechnology Demos and Simulations	Online

For more events, please visit the ATE Central Events page or, if you have any upcoming events that you would like posted on ATE Central or in the ATE Central Connection, please send them to info@atecentral.net.

To add a continuously-updated list of ATE and STEM education events to your web site, use the ATE Event Widget.

Featured Project

Synergy Collaborative Laboratory for Research, Practice and Transformation

http://synergyrpt.org/

The Synergy Collaborative Laboratory for Research, Practice and Transformation (SynergyRPT) builds on research to create and grow a national network of expertise. This network helps projects and centers realize potential scale and impact. The SynergyRPT model has become a brand and icon for a collaborative, reflective process that attains meaningful improvement in technological education programs. This is evidenced by the number of recent participant project proposals and programs that have adopted aspects of workshops and conferences to enable the scaling of innovations, problem-based learning, a broader research platform, enhanced opportunities for practice, and greater transformation as means for achieving impact. SynergyRPT brings together three main elements that enhance innovation and technological education reform.

On the site, visitors will find more information about the project, the Synergy Centers, news, and events. The Resources and Tools section contains printed materials from past meetings and summits as downloadable zip files, and links to reimbursement and team contact information.

Featured Resources in Learning & Evaluation

From EvaluATE:

ATE Evaluation Primer

http://evalu-ate.org/app/webroot/files/uploads/ATE_evaluation_primer.pdf

This PDF document contains a primer on the ATE evaluation process for NSF-ATE program officers and grantees. The material discusses the evaluation process, how to find a qualified evaluator for your project, what should be included in the evaluation section of an ATE proposal, budget concerns, evaluation reports and more.

2009 ATE PI Conference: Birds of a Feather Session on Learning and Evaluation

http://evalu-ate.org/app/webroot/files/uploads/learning-and-evaluation-birds-of-a-feather.pdf

This sheet from the 2009 ATE PI conference contains information about a session on the evaluation of teacher professional development and its impact on teaching, learning, and more. It includes a table which highlights foci of evaluations and possible evaluation methods.

From the DECA Project:

DECA Project: Presentations and Publications

http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/decaproject/pubs/

This page includes an archive of the presentations and publications created by the DECA (Discovering the Educational Consequences of Advanced Technological Education) Project, located at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The presentations and publications, which include a number of white papers, are available for download in PowerPoint and PDF file formats.

Social Media Tip of the Month

Linking Up with LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the largest and most vibrant professional network. It represents an opportunity for indirect project promotion and thought leadership. Business pages are most appropriate for your project's umbrella organization or host, but individual networks can also be useful. For example, individuals can contribute to groups or associations and related conversation, and they can also respond to answers, an area which takes queries from various fields.

LinkedIn also offers some general features that may be of particular use to the ATE community. For example, members can form groups, which include discussion forums, to keep in touch with geographically dispersed colleagues. Project and center PIs and staff can use the website to network with other people who can support their initiatives, like potential industry partners or prospective campus allies. Finally, simply having a LinkedIn profile increases your visibility and makes it easier to strike up a conversation with someone else in the community.

Like all forms of social media, LinkedIn comes with its own set of pros and cons. You should expect to spend some time on the site if you want to reap the benefits of what it has to offer, but the time commitment is significantly less than other social media options like Facebook or Twitter.

Pros of LinkedIn:

Connects your project or center to a professional community audience
Good site for presenting research findings, white papers, or other documents about your work
Minimal maintenance time

Cons of LinkedIn:

Relatively small and specialized audience
Focused mostly on professional-to-professional connection (rather than, for example, community-building)

What to plan for:

Create a business page and include Facebook and Twitter links if available
Join groups and comb through answers for opportunities to engage with and contribute to the community

Community Connection

Thinking about submitting a proposal for HI-TEC? Here's why you should.

HI-TEC The High Impact Technology Exchange Conference (HI-TEC) has become a mainstay of the ATE community conference circuit. As a national conference focused on advanced technological education in a variety of disciplines, co-produced by a consortium of ATE centers and projects, HI-TEC is a great place to meet ATE colleagues, find out what other projects and centers are doing, keep up with new technologies, and make connections with industry.

Although the conference will not take place until July 21-24, 2013, the organizing committee is now accepting proposals for half-day preconference workshops (due January 14), variable-length conference sessions, and poster sessions (both due February 1). Information on how to sign up for a technology showcase booth will be available in January of 2013. Since the 500+ conference attendees are predominantly 2-year and 4-year college technical or science educators, the conference presents ATE projects and centers with a unique opportunity to showcase their work to a targeted audience. In addition, presenting at HI-TEC—whether you're interested in covering half a day or 45 minutes—can be a critical part of your project or center's outreach and dissemination strategy.

If this sounds like a good fit for you and your project/center, please consider submitting a proposal to HI-TEC. Although more complete information is available on the website, for conference sessions, preference will be given to proposals that:

Cover new activities, successful approaches, lessons learned, or content development.
Report and provide a detailed case study of successful models for recruiting and retaining students, working with other educational institutions or partnerships with industry and other external organizations or other such topics.
Report new content or information that is a result of collaboration between projects, centers, industry, or other partners.
Contain new, recently developed hands-on learning activities, experiments or demonstrations which provide participants with take away resources.

So if you and your team have an innovative idea for a proposal or panel you'd like to put together and share with the ATE community, other educators, and industry partners, be sure to submit a proposal to HI-TEC 2013. Whether you're submitting a proposal or not, HI-TEC is a great place to make connections and learn more about the exciting work other ATE projects and centers are doing, so mark your calendars and register in February. We look forward to seeing you in Austin!

Did you know?

Between 2006 and 2011, ATE grantees created 1,110 commercially published materials.

News & Reminders

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Can CWIS Software Help Support Your Project Goals?

CWIS is open source software, created with NSF funding, that can help your project or center showcase resources online. It's free and very easy to use. We'd be happy to provide you with more information about CWIS and give you a quick tour of its features — please e-mail cwis@scout.wisc.edu to get started!

Find Out More About ATE Central

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