Episode 106 - Happy Retirement Terry!

Tech Talk 4 Teachers

In this episode we speak with Terry Hyder who is retiring from 14 years of service to the Instructional Technology Center. Terry discusses some of the changes that have occurred over the past few years. Happy Retirement Terry!!!



Right Click Here to Download MP3
(8 minutes 38 seconds)

Technology Pick of the Week
My technology pick of the week this week is a word cloud service called ABCya, a link is available in the show notes.

ABCya Word Clouds
http://abcya.com/word_clouds.htm

ABCya is a lot like Wordle, a previous TechTalk4Teachers pick of the week, in that you can copy and paste text into a text box and then have it converted into a word cloud. One nice feature is the ability to right-click on a word and then delete the word if you do not want to have that particular word in your word cloud.

That wraps it up for episode 106 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at http://www.eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the TechTalk4Teachers blog. Happy Retirement Terry! Until next time this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning!

Full Transcript for Episode 106 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers:

Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Episode 106 - Happy Retirement Terry!

Tech Talk 4 Teachers
Tom Grissom: It’s Wednesday March 31st 2010 and welcome to episode 106 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers. I’m Tom Grissom
Terry Hyder: and I’m Terry Hyder.
Tom: Welcome Terry.
Terry Hyder: Hi!
Tom: Great to have you today. I wanted to invite you in because this is a very special day, bittersweet for me. But I wanted to welcome you and this is going to be your last day here at the ITC. Going to be retiring here, so, I want to wish you well for that and publicly recognize you for all the great work that you’ve done over the years.
Terry: Thanks, I have had a wonderful time. That’s the reason I’ve been here for fourteen years at just one job for campus.
Tom: Yep, fourteen years. One job here at the ITC, so things have changed a little bit in the last fourteen years, haven’t they?
Terry: Just slightly, yes. We’ve gone from, when I first came we had only one set of Ellison dies and they were letter sets and now we have well over 400 and they’re all different patterns and things like that. So that, plus the computer lab has grown immensely and I’ve gone from, was it the 8 inch floppy disk, yeah, type thing? To the little mini flash-drives.
Tom: Yep, the USB flash-drives.
Terry: So, that was something else as well.
Tom: Yeah, and we’ve been keeping data traffic counts and every year we’ve had over 100,000 student visits.
Terry: Oh my gosh.
Tom: So, I was thinking last night, adding that up, fourteen years, that’s 1.4 million student visits.
Terry: Holy cow!
Tom: So no wonder we’re tired in the evening whenever we go home. The building that were in was also renovated.
Terry: That’s right.
Tom: So can you tell a little bit about what that change was like from the older building to the newer building?
Terry: The building is really an elementary school. The hallways were very much narrower than what they are now. There were lockers everywhere, up and down all the hallways. When my husband came, he was head of the Department of Journalism and his office was the principal’s office and had the original principal’s desk and everything, wooden desk. But the ITC is now, was where Special Ed is now and it was very small. Where we are now, present day was a big garage type place. It had a big boat in it, it had boa constrictor in it, self contained, thank you very much. It also had a wheel for ceramics.
Tom: And where we’re at presently, it was the art studio?
Terry: Yes, the art studio and journalism was down here mostly on the first floor. College of Ed was up on the second floor. Dean’s office and everything was up on the second floor. They had two kitchens across the hall for home economics, the stoves and everything were still there and that was journalism’s computer lab. And that’s present day where the Dean’s office is. And so it was quite fun. We had a swimming pool, they filled that in with sand and you can kind of still see that. It was just crazy!
Tom: Okay, we’ve certainly changed over the years and we’ve evolved as the new technologies and things have arrived. One of the things that we do a lot of in the ITC is helping students with their project-based learning and we do a lot of project-based learning activities. I know our students always look to you, especially for like the bulletin boards and doing some of the Ellison dies and things like that. But what else has changed over, you know, the course of the last several years? What do you think was one of the biggest changes between when you started?
Terry: When I first started, we didn’t do any of that. In fact, everything that we had was in one four-drawer filing cabinet and that was it. You pulled the drawer out to get your markers. You pulled the drawer out to get an idea book out. So, we really didn’t have that much space to do anything with. We maybe had two tables versus our ten now. All the space that we have and plus we offer so much more now than they would have ever dreamed of.
Tom: Yeah, it makes a great place for them to come in and work on their projects.
Terry: It is just absolutely wonderful, these kids here do not understand how privileged they are to have this.
Tom: Yeah, it’s certainly a great asset for the college.
Terry: Take advantage, please. Yes, yes!
Tom: Anything else you’d like to share on the podcast here this morning?
Terry: That I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my job or I would not have stayed as long as I did.
Tom: Well you’re certainly going to be missed, I can certainly tell you that.
Terry: I love working with the students and I didn’t think I was, because I was a preschool teacher before and I thought, oh this is not going to happen. But, I did. I shifted gears and it was fine. I found that about myself, that I was more creative than what I thought I was. And helping out with the students and hashing it out, talking about what they had to do, and it just makes your day.
Tom: Thinking back, because I came to Eastern 98-99, and we were doing the computers on wheels and then we moved to the new building. And Pat Fuel, the former director here, we were doing all those checkouts and now then we have all the netbook carts and laptop carts and flip cameras and digital cameras. We just do a ton of checkouts.
Terry: We certainly do.
Tom: And the students are certainly doing those digital projects all over the place and that’s a big change. Every classroom is what we call a Technology Enhanced Classroom. We were the first college on campus to have that and it’s just really interesting seeing all the resources that the internet has to offer.
Terry: That’s the reason it is so good for these students to have a place like this to come to work. They just don’t realize that when they get out into the schools system, that they’re going to have to fight to get what they want as far as stuff. They’ll know how to use it.
Tom: Yeah, and that’s the big thing that we want to expose them to all the different technologies and things so that’s certainly what we try and do here. Well, I want to thank you very much and wish you the very best of retirements and enjoy those grandkids out there.
Terry: Oh, I am!
Tom: And some trips back home. So, thank you very much for all your service over these years.
Terry: Thank you for having me.
Tom: You’re very welcome.

Technology pick of the week

Tom: My technology pick of the week this week is ABCYa word clouds. ABCYa is a very simple word cloud creator and it’s very easy to use. It’s very similar to the wordle program which was a former technology pick of the week.

Technology pick of the week
Tom: My technology pick of the week this week is ABCYa word clouds. ABCYa is a very simple word cloud creator and it’s very easy to use. It’s very similar to the wordle program which was a former technology pick of the week.
http://abcya.com
You just simply copy and paste text into a text box and click on the arrow and it will automatically generate a very simple word cloud. Now, this one to me, is a little bit easier to use than wordle and one of the nice features is that you can also right click on a word and then delete the word. So, if you have a series of words that you paste in and there’s one word that you don’t want to appear on your word cloud, you can just simply right click, and then chose the delete option. And it does give you the option to save, which it will be a public save, and then also to print. But, ABCYa is one of those very simple word cloud editors out there. You can change the colors, you can change the font and layout and it also has a randomize feature if you don’t like the way the words are laid out the first time that you hit the next button. So, I’ll provide a link for that in the show notes it’s ABCYa word clouds. That wraps it up for Episode 106 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers, show notes for this episode and archive episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center’s website at www.eiu.edu/itc . Leave a comment or suggestion or send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk 4 Teachers blog. I want to thank Terry Hyder for doing the interview today and certainly wish her the very best of retirements. Happy retirement Terry! Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning…

You just simply copy and paste text into a text box and click on the arrow and it will automatically generate a very simple word cloud. Now, this one to me, is a little bit easier to use than wordle and one of the nice features is that you can also right click on a word and then delete the word. So, if you have a series of words that you paste in and there’s one word that you don’t want to appear on your word cloud, you can just simply right click, and then chose the delete option. And it does give you the option to save, which it will be a public save, and then also to print. But, ABCYa is one of those very simple word cloud editors out there. You can change the colors, you can change the font and layout and it also has a randomize feature if you don’t like the way the words are laid out the first time that you hit the next button. So, I’ll provide a link for that in the show notes it’s ABCYa word clouds. That wraps it up for Episode 106 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers, show notes for this episode and archive episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center’s website at www.eiu.edu/itc . Leave a comment or suggestion or send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk 4 Teachers blog. I want to thank Terry Hyder for doing the interview today and certainly wish her the very best of retirements. Happy retirement Terry! Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning…

You just simply copy and paste text into a text box and click on the arrow and it will automatically generate a very simple word cloud. Now, this one to me, is a little bit easier to use than wordle and one of the nice features is that you can also right click on a word and then delete the word. So, if you have a series of words that you paste in and there’s one word that you don’t want to appear on your word cloud, you can just simply right click, and then chose the delete option. And it does give you the option to save, which it will be a public save, and then also to print. But, ABCYa is one of those very simple word cloud editors out there. You can change the colors, you can change the font and layout and it also has a randomize feature if you don’t like the way the words are laid out the first time that you hit the next button. So, I’ll provide a link for that in the show notes it’s ABCYa word clouds. That wraps it up for Episode 106 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers, show notes for this episode and archive episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center’s website at www.eiu.edu/itc . Leave a comment or suggestion or send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk 4 Teachers blog. I want to thank Terry Hyder for doing the interview today and certainly wish her the very best of retirements. Happy retirement Terry! Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning…
You just simply copy and paste text into a text box and click on the arrow and it will automatically generate a very simple word cloud. Now, this one to me, is a little bit easier to use than wordle and one of the nice features is that you can also right click on a word and then delete the word. So, if you have a series of words that you paste in and there’s one word that you don’t want to appear on your word cloud, you can just simply right click, and then chose the delete option. And it does give you the option to save, which it will be a public save, and then also to print. But, ABCYa is one of those very simple word cloud editors out there. You can change the colors, you can change the font and layout and it also has a randomize feature if you don’t like the way the words are laid out the first time that you hit the next button. So, I’ll provide a link for that in the show notes it’s ABCYa word clouds. That wraps it up for Episode 106 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers, show notes for this episode and archive episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center’s website at www.eiu.edu/itc . Leave a comment or suggestion or send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk 4 Teachers blog. I want to thank Terry Hyder for doing the interview today and certainly wish her the very best of retirements. Happy retirement Terry! Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning!