Current Winners
Nominations for the 2007–2008 Gertrude Cox Award will be accepted November 1, 2007 – November 30, 2007
Winner
The winner of this year's Gertrude Cox Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching & Learning with Technology is Dr. Scott M. Fitzpatrick of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. This honor is granted each year to someone in the university who markedly furthers the integration of technology into the teaching process. This can be either by developing new forms of teaching technology, or by finding new and imaginative ways to use existing technology. Professor Fitzpatrick's work is an excellent example of the latter. He has developed a set of interactive online modules in archaeology called "ARCHAEinteractive." These modules guide students through a variety of problem solving exercises. As students progress through each module, they are confronted with a variety of maps, photographs, survey and excavation data, interactive timelines, film clips, and other archaeological resources specifically developed to analyze various methodological or theoretical issues. This rich collection of material, artfully integrated within each module, allows a large number of students to closely observe archaeological excavations. It also provides a rich medium for the practice of analytical skills by students. Scott Fitzpatrick's modules are invaluable pedagogical tools for making archaeology much more accessible to the average student.
Project award
Sometimes a project is submitted which is larger, longer-lived, and dependent on a larger group of people than the typical single-course submission. Such a work might be eligible for a Project Award. This year the judges perceived the DELTA Instructional Services Faculty Support Team for the Summer Institute to be especially deserving of a Gertrude Cox Project Award. That team over the last nine years has taught almost 400 NCSU faculty how to improve their pedagogy by using technology. In addition, 8 of the faculty members who have won past Gertrude Cox awards have attended the Summer Institute, and 6 of this year's nominees attended. The faculty members who attend the Summer Institute learn about supported technologies and resources available to them on campus. They gain specific technical skills for the creation of online learning materials that can supplement a face-to-face courses, support hybrid learning, or even teach an entire course via distance education. The leverage provided by the DELTA team in improving instruction at NCSU has been tremendous. It has been aided by staff members from the Office of Information Technology and the Library whose work was integral to the formation of the Summer Institute. The DELTA team richly deserves the Project Award because of its success in advancing the goals of our LITRE program (Learning In A Technologically-Rich Environment), as well as the goals of the Gertrude Cox Award. I invite the Summer Institute core team members Stacy Smith, Associate Director, Lisa Fiedor, Greg Kraus, Kim McAllister, and Charlie Morris to come up to receive this award.
Special Recognition
This year the judges have elected to award Special Recognition to another of the Cox nominations. This award goes to Dr. Candy Beal and Dr. Carol Pope of the College of Education and Lodge McCammon, a doctoral student in the Friday Institute, whom Dr. Neal and Pope described as providing extraordinary talent and assistance. Their project is titled, The Outsiders Meet the Digital Native Generation: Creating a New Model of Teacher Preparation. The project is designed to teach NCSU students how to be better teachers in middle school classes, using as its focus E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders. Middle school students, under the guidance of their NCSU student teachers, create blogs that result in musical creations based on the novel. The students develop the musical pieces and are recorded singing them. The work engenders great excitement among the middle school students and also among the student teachers sent by NCSU. Included in the technologies integrated in the course is advanced audio-visual recording to arouse interest and enthusiasm. This project is especially impressive because of the importance of the university's mission in providing the public schools with their next cohort of teachers.
View nominations for 2007–2008