Summer Professional Development Goes to the Movies - Summer 2023

THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN TURNS 100 YEARS OLD

This summer we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Hollywood sign so we are headed to “the movies”. Whether you are creating a video, using video to learn, or watching films to better understand the experiences of others, this summer PD has something for you.

Q1: What year was the Hollywood sign created?

A: 1923

Q2: How much did the original sign cost?

A: $21,000

Q3: How long was the original sign supposed to stay up?

A: One and a half years. It was originally a “billboard” for a real estate development called Hollywoodland.

Q4: Who built the sign?

A: The sign was built by Los Angeles Times publisher, Harry Chandler, who was also the real estate developer for Hollywoodland.

Q5: How large is the sign?

A: Each letter is 30 feet wide and 43 feet tall. The letters are constructed from 3x9 metal squares on an intricate frame of scaffolding, metal pipes, wires, and telephone poles.

MEET THE STARS OF THE APEX TEAM

Title of your Movie Memoir: Raiders of the Lost Course

Title of your Movie Memoir: Obituary Opus

Title of your movie memoir: Mountains to Climb

Actor who will portray you: A young Harrison Ford

Plot of your movie: An adventure movie about a missing online course that holds the key to the future of education. When an acclaimed instructional technologist's online course goes missing, he embarks on a perilous journey across the internet to recover it. Along the way, he teams up with a team of tech-savvy educators to overcome obstacles and solve puzzles in order to uncover the truth about the course's disappearance.

Actor who will portray you: Kathy Bates

Plot of your movie: Within ten minutes of meeting anyone, the conversation turns to genealogy or music. Who were your grandparents, and did they play music?

Actor who will portray you: Jamie Lee Curtis

Plot of your movie: After recovering from debilitating knee surgery, Lea Ann is determined to see all of the best places from the top (or bottom) of some epic hikes.

DID YOU KNOW?

Stars pay $75,000 after selection to have their star put on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Lea Ann Trea

Todd

Trea Kimball Curriculum & Assessment Specialist

Todd Will Teaching & Technology Specialist

Lea Ann Turner Manager, Academic and Professional Excellence

SUMMER BOOK STUDIES

READ THE BOOK BEFORE IT BECOMES A MOVIE

All Book Studies are OER

This year’s book studies are modeling our commitment to find quality open educational resources for learning. Every book can be downloaded for free and either sent to Digicopy for printing or read online. Discussions will take place on a Padlet with reminders sent out weekly to stay active in the conversation.

The Norton Guide to Equity Minded

Teaching by Flower Darby, Isis Artze-Vega, Bryan Dewsbury, and Mays Imad

Download the Book | Discussion Sign Up

Written by renowned teaching and learning experts, this guide offers concrete steps to help any instructor striving to ensure that all students and, in particular, historically underserved students have an equal chance for success. Here you’ll find actionable tips, grounded in research, for teaching college classes online, in person, and everywhere in between.

Professors at Play edited by Lisa Forbes and David Thomas (with contribution from our own Kelly Steidinger)

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Professors at Play invites educators to explore the transformative power of play in the higher education setting.

Equity Review Tool

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In the constantly and rapidly evolving landscape of higher education, it is important to seek opportunities for continuous evaluation and improvement. This tool is designed for educators striving to create more validating and affirming learning experiences and environments for students who are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, poverty-affected, first-generation, non-maleidentifying, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled. To do this well, it is critical to understand the intersectionality of these identities and how that may affect a student’s experience.

The Definitive 100 Most Useful Productivity Tips

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We could all be more productive. Between the daily deluge of digital distractions and our own bad habits and human fallibility, there is probably room for improvement somewhere. With endless articles online offering productivity advice, how to separate the wheat from the chaff? We brought some method to the madness. We scoured hundreds of articles online and found the top 100 most frequently cited tips. We then ranked them using their overall score on the below stats. Each tip is organized by category, utility, and difficulty (complexity and required willpower)

EQUITY AND INCLUSION

SUMMER BOOK STUDY

EQUITY AND INCLUSION WEEKLY FILM & DISCUSSION

Every Thursday during the Summer, there will be a movie from our Kanopy collection shown in the APEX Center that highlights various Equity and Inclusion topics. Bring your lunch, your laptop, or even your lawn chair to work while you watch. Each movie will be followed by a short discussion. The APEX will be stocked with sodas and popcorn. To add the movie date and time to your calendar, Click the ADD TO CALENDAR button below each movie.

June 1: 12:00 – 2:00

Chronic Illness

Breathe 2017 (1:57 min) When Robin (Andrew Garfield) is struck down by polio at the age of 28, he is confined to a hospital bed and given only a few months to live. With the help of his wife Diana (Claire Foy) and her twin brothers, Robin and Diana dare to escape the hospital ward to seek out a full and passionate life together — raising their young son, traveling and devoting their lives to helping other polio patients. BREATHE is a heartwarming celebration of love and human possibility.

June 8: 12:00 – 1:30

Framing Agnes 2022 (1:15 min) The pseudonymous Agnes was a pioneering transgender woman who participated in an infamous gender health study conducted at UCLA in the 1960s. Her clever use of the study to gain access to gender-affirming healthcare led to her status as a fascinating and celebrated figure in trans history. In this innovative cinematic exercise that blends fiction and nonfiction, director Chase Joynt (No Ordinary Man) uses Agnes’s story, along with others unearthed in long-shelved case files, to widen the frame through which trans history is viewed. This collective reclamation breaks down the myth of isolation among transgender history-makers, breathing new life into a lineage of collaborators and conspirators who have been forgotten for far too long.

June 15: 12:00 – 1:30

The Slanted Screen: Hollywood’s Presentation of Asian Men in Film & TV 2006 (54 min) From silent film star Sessue Hayakawa to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, THE SLANTED SCREEN explores the portrayals of Asian men in American cinema, chronicling the experiences of actors who have had to struggle against ethnic stereotyping and limiting roles. The film presents a critical examination of Hollywood's imagemaking machine, through a fascinating parade of 50 film clips spanning a century.

LGBTQ+

Race

EQUITY AND INCLUSION WEEKLY FILM & DISCUSSION

June 22: 12:00 – 2:00

Incarceration

June 29: 12:00 – 2:00

July 13: 12:00 – 2:00

The Woodsman 2005 (1:27 min) The film stars Kevin Bacon as a convicted child molester who must adjust to life after prison. Its name refers to the woodsman from the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood who kills the wolf to save the titular child. The choices he makes and the discrimination he feels address the ability of one to forgive and heal.

DID YOU KNOW?

Gender

The Mask You Live In 2015 (1:31 min)

THE MASK YOU LIVE IN follows boys and young men as they struggle to stay true to themselves while negotiating America’s narrow definition of masculinity. Pressured by the media, their peer group, and even the adults in their lives, our protagonists confront messages encouraging them to disconnect from their emotions, devalue authentic friendships, objectify and degrade women, and resolve conflicts through violence. These gender stereotypes interconnect with race, class, and circumstance, creating a maze of identity issues boys and young men must navigate to become “real” men. Experts in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, sports, education, and media also weigh in, offering empirical evidence of the “boy crisis” and tactics to combat it. The Mask You Live In ultimately illustrates how we, as a society, can raise a healthier generation of boys and young men.

Ethnicity

Up Heartbreak Hill 2012 (1hr 22min)

Up Heartbreak Hill chronicles the lives of three Native American teenagers in Navajo, New Mexico as they navigate their senior year at a reservation high school. As graduation nears, they must decide whether or not to stay in their community-a place inextricably woven into the fiber of their beings-or leave in pursuit of opportunities elsewhere. Largely isolated from mainstream America, they hesitate to separate from their families and traditions, rooted to home in equal parts by love, obligation, and fear. Tribal elders urge members of the younger generation to leave-acquire an education or learn a trade-and return home with the skills to help their people. But, with a poverty rate of 65% and a per capita income under $6,200, Navajo has few prospects. Up Heartbreak Hill is a moving look at a new generation of Americans struggling with what it means to be Native American in the contemporary world.

Before the area was named Hollywood, it was known as Cahuenga Valley.

The Jazz Singer was the first full length movie produced with audio in 1927.

July 20: 12:00 – 2:00

The Florida Project 2017 (1:51 min) Set on a stretch of highway in a budget motel managed by Bobby (Willem Dafoe), just outside the imagined utopia of Disney World, THE FLORIDA PROJECT follows six-year-old Moonee and her rebellious mother over the course of a single summer. The slice of life plot focuses on the summertime adventures of a six-year-old girl who lives with her unemployed single mother in a budget motel in Kissimmee, Florida. Their struggle to make ends meet and stave off homelessness takes place in an environment dominated by the nearby Walt Disney World, which was code named "The Florida Project" during its early planning stages. Willem Dafoe was nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for his performance. Nominated for Best Director and Best Feature at the Film Independent Spirit Awards. Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival.

July 27: 12:00 – 1:15

Neurodivergence

Autism Goes to College 2020 (1:02 min) As the number of students on the autism spectrum attending college steadily climbs, schools and students alike are trying to figure out how to manage the unique challenges experienced by this community. Getting accepted is often easy enough, but once on campus, navigating college can be challenging in many ways, often leaving students to figure it out as they go along. Five students on the autism spectrum Guillermo, Jasmine, Caroline, Jonathan, and Aniella — invite viewers into their dorms and classrooms to show the world how they make college work for them. They share their dreams, fears, failures, and successes with candid insights and humor. The students in the film come up against the typical challenges any other college student would encounter such as academic loads, making friends, handling roommate situations, and handling money. Disability services counselors at colleges try out a patchwork of new approaches and programs to help both students and faculty better accommodate their unique needs.

Poverty

Inclusivity Workshop

Led by Karen Brzezinski and Natasha Miller

July 17, 10:00 – 11:00

APEX Center

This workshop will explore gender identity, sexual orientation, and other LGBTQ+ topics and focuses on how to create an inclusive space for this community.

Bridges out of Poverty

Led by Suzanne Rathe & Mike Topness

July 19, 9:00 – 10:00

APEX Center

Click Here to Register

In this session we will explore Dr. Ruby Payne’s Bridges out of Poverty work. Dr. Payne’s work revolves around generational poverty and how we can help stop the cycle. Supporting economically disadvantaged students is a focus of this session.

Click Here to Register

“BEHIND THE SCENES” WITH BLACKBOARD ULTRA

May Workshops (Registration Required)

May 23, 9:00 – 2:00

Moving to Blackboard Ultra is not a requirement yet, but many faculty are choosing to move to Ultra because

• It is mobile friendly

• It has a clean modern interface

• It is ADA compliant

• It is easier to design courses in Ultra

• It will eventually be a requirement (the timeline has not been established yet)

If you are interested in moving one or more courses to Ultra OR want to try it out before it becomes a requirement, join us for the Behind the Scenes and “Ultrafy ” Your Course workshops.

Behind the Scenes in Ultra Workshop – In this workshop we will build a course together, from scratch, using Blackboard Ultra. You will get to see every feature in Ultra during our workshop. Location: APEX Center (in-person only) Click Here to Register

May 24, 9:00 – 2:00

“Ultrafy ” your Course Workshop - Spend the day in the APEX Center with Lea Ann to move one (or more) of your courses to Blackboard Ultra. Click Here to Register

You may also schedule time with Todd or Lea Ann throughout the Summer to work on learning and building in Ultra.

AN EPIC ADVENTURE with Windows 11

Windows 11 Training for Early Adopters

Windows 10 is reaching end of life status and the college is beginning the transition to Windows 11. This training will give you a peak into what is new in Windows 11 and revisit some of the often-forgotten gems that were introduced in Windows 10. Once you have attended training, you may submit a ticket to have your work computer upgraded to Windows 11.

IT has developed a process that will update your computer to Windows 11 without the need for reimaging. The process takes approximately 1 hour.

Click on the training date and time to register.

May 31, 1:00 – 2:00

June 20, 10:00 – 11:00

July 11, 1:00 – 2:00

Training this summer is for those who want to be early adopters. Computers will not be required to upgrade to Windows 11 until August 1, 2024.

Special note: Classroom instructor stations, Lab, and LiNK computers will not be upgraded until May of 2024.

WHAT’S NEW

• New start menu and task bar

• Action Center/Media Control

• Enhanced search bar

• Widgets

• Snap Layouts (LOVE THIS!)

• Focus sessions

• Voice typing

• Advanced gesture controls on trackpads

• New default apps

• New photo app

• Redesigned settings menu

• Upgrades to multiple desktops

• Separation of Teams Chat and Teams

videoconferencing

• New wallpaper and notification sounds

Couch Potato Professional Development

Enjoy some quick learning right from the comfort of your own home or desk with our Summer Couch Potato professional development series.

Sign up for Teaching Tip Emails

Sign up for Technology Tip Emails

When you sign up, you will get periodic emails throughout the summer with quick ideas and tips for teaching excellence, student success, and technology. Emails will contain a quick summary, a link to a short video, and a call to action.

Sign up for Excel Tips & Tricks Emails

Sign up by June 1 to be added to the email list for the topics of your choice.

Lights, Cameras, Teach: Creating Effective Instructional Videos

This course teaches participants how to create effective instructional videos that engage and inspire viewers using Panopto and Adobe Premiere Rush. You'll learn the fundamentals of planning, scripting, filming, editing, and publishing video content that aligns with your instructional goals. Through hands-on practice, you'll use Panopto and Adobe Premiere Rush to develop the skills and knowledge needed to create high-quality instructional videos that support student learning and engagement.

Video Creation Workshop

June 21, 8:30 – 12:00

APEX Center

Click Here to Register

Then join us for the Summer Cookout on the Rapids Campus that day.

Click Here to Sign Up for the Cookout

(GREAT FOR ANTHOLOGY DOCUMENTATION)

Click

Location: APEX Center* Option 1: May 30, 2:00 – 3:00

Option 2: June 1, 9:00 – 10:00

Option 3: June 19, 2:00 – 3:00

Option 4: June 20, 9:00 – 10:00

Tango is a tool that enables you to create how-to-guides and standard operating procedures in seconds in web-based environments.

Capture

Document steps on any website or web-based software. Tango automatically creates a step-by-step guide with perfectly cropped screenshots, links, and annotations.

Customize

Blur out sensitive information, add annotations, or draw freehand. Edit or add steps and images.

Share

Publish or share your guide with one click, share a direct link, or export to PDF.

*This is an in-person workshop because Tango does not work while sharing screens using Teams. If you need training on your home campus, please contact Lea Ann and she will arrange training for you.

DID YOU KNOW?

Data from the 2021 McKinsey study addressing anti-black bias in Hollywood has led to the creation of representation and inclusion standards for Academy Awards that will be used for the first time in 2024.

ENGAGING STUDENTS THINK TANK

Engaging Students Think Tank

Our professional development series this year has been a big hit with those who want to collaborate and bounce ideas off of colleagues to find creative solutions to improve classroom instruction. This summer, we are going to turn it into a 4-hour workshop that will give you time to brainstorm, research, develop, and implement a new idea.

1. Identify an area of need in your class through a creative brainstorming process.

2. Research and ideate solutions to meet your need with a group of colleagues.

3. Develop a new solution specific to your class.

4. Make an implementation and evaluation plan to put your new solution into action.

August 1, 9:00 – 1:00

Do a 2-3 minute presentation of your plan at faculty Inservice*

*Optional

What is FQAS?

Faculty Quality Assurance System is a series of courses required by all faculty that teach in the Wisconsin Technical College System. We hire you as experts in your field, through FQAS, we give you the knowledge and tools to become an expert instructor.

FQAS for FULL-TIME FACULTY

New Faculty Onboarding

July 25 & 26, 8:30 – 4:00

This is designed for new full-time faculty at Mid-State. Participation in the onboarding plus monthly new faculty meetings will meet the requirements for all FQAS courses.

FQAS for PART-TIME FACULTY

FQAS Basecamp 1 – Foundations of Teaching and Learning

Required of new part-time faculty or any faculty who have not completed FQAS Basecamp 1. This course covers everything you need as you need it during your first semester of teaching at Mid-State. In this course, you will learn about all of your resources and student resources at Mid-State, learn how to find your curriculum, how to build a Mid-State syllabus, how your course should be organized, how to use Blackboard, and so much more.

FQAS Basecamp 2 – Theory and Practice of Teaching and Learning

Required of part-time faculty who have completed FQAS 1. In this course we dive into learning theory and practical strategies to apply those theories. This course is full of great ideas to make learning engaging.

FQAS 911 for Protective Services Part-Time Faculty

Part-Time faculty teaching in the Law Enforcement Academy have a special FQAS course that will supplement only the needed competencies not covered in the national training you take to become instructors.

You are

auto-enrolled

FQAS Basecamp 3 – Advanced Topics in Teaching and Learning

This is the last class in the series and is required of part-time faculty who have completed FQAS 1 & 2. This course covers Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the classroom and ensuring that all students feel included and welcome.

in the FQAS course that you need. Please check your Blackboard to see the course. Contact Lea Ann Turner if you do not see the course you need.