Empowering Faculty with Creative Technologies: Spring 2025 Faculty Development Programming

In March and April, I had the privilege of leading two different faculty development events. Both centralized leveraging creative technologies to show off the incredible work faculty are doing inside and outside of the classroom for public audiences.

Our Branding Your Teaching Excellence (BYTE) Framework is at the heart of our faculty development initiatives. More information about the framework and the programming we are developing is forthcoming!

At the Women & Technology Summit, hosted by IU’s Center of Excellence for Women & Technology, my collaborator Miranda Rodak & I facilitated “Transforming Your Teaching Philosophy Statement with Creative Technologies.” This presentation encouraged faculty and graduate students to embrace the creative spirit of their teaching by reframing their approach to writing the teaching philosophy statement (TPS), a central document for academic hiring and promotion.

The video you see below - a remediated TPS - was created using Canva and demonstrated how faculty can adapt and leverage stock footage and templates to suit their needs. By leaning into the affordances of tools like Canva, you don’t have to be a design expert to produce dynamic digital artifacts! Instead of fixating on the nuances of video production, you can instead focus on the needs of your audience and the content of the story you are telling.

Then, in April, I co-facilitated workshops on the professional and pedagogical value of digital portfolios for the current two cohorts of Digital Gardener Faculty Fellows at IU and beyond. These workshops are always a hit. While faculty are often familiar with ePortfolios as a high-impact educational practice, they are less confident bringing their own work online using tools like Google Sites (not to mention paid tools like Squarespace!). Through these workshops, I’m able to inspire faculty to take the plunge into the world of professional portfolios and share what I’ve learned through my multi-year journey, beginning with how I pushed Google Sites to the limit before I migrated to Squarespace, my current platform.