About this blog

Welcome to Techademia, a site where the Academic Computing Consultants at Vassar College write about technology and teaching.

This blog will be about our teaching and your teaching. We envision this site as a place where we hope to do a little teaching, about things that may be too new or obscure to have caught your notice. At the same time, these writings will  focus on teaching at the college level, while highlighting ways in which technology can enhance— or even revolutionize— that teaching.

Every faculty member that I’ve met at Vassar is wholly committed to his or her teaching. Many tell me that they’re really interested in one technology or another that might help their students to understand their course materials better. But they’re also really, really busy and can rarely find the time to take workshops or tinker around with new devices or programs.

We hope that his blog will provide a way for you to fit a little bit of this learning into your busy schedule. We aim to generate new postings each week, on various topics related to teaching with technology. Those topics will range from descriptions of very specific gadgets to discussions of pedagogical approaches. Some will be specific to Vassar, while others will be more generic.

The primary contributors will be the four members of Vassar’s Academic Computing Services (ACS) group. (If you’d like to know more about us, see the authors’ profiles, at the top of the page.) We may have occasional guest contributors as well, and we invite anyone in the Vassar community to comment on what they read.

Looking forward to some interesting discussions,

Steve

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Recent Posts

Live Captioning in a Powerpoint Presentation

The current version of Powerpoint* includes a great accessibility feature: it will automatically transcribe your spoken remarks in real time, displayed as subtitles, while you give your presentation. If you give slide presentations, this is a great function for making your lectures more accessible– for the hearing-impaired, but also for non-native English-speaking students.

Here’s a short demonstration. (Remember, these subtitles were machine-generated in real-time, as I spoke.)

The live subtitling function can also do language translations. You can choose the language that the speaker will be using: Chinese, American, Canadian or British English, French, German, Italian, Latvian, or Spanish. You can then choose the language in which your subtitles will appear, from a list of more than 60 languages.

Here’s the same demonstration, but with French chosen as the subtitle language:

* Real-time subtitling is available only with the Powerpoint component of the desktop version of Microsoft 365. It is not available in Microsoft Office (the predecessor of Microsoft 365) and it is not available in the web-based version of Microsoft 365. Please contact the Vassar Service Desk if you need help installing Microsoft 365 on your device.

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