Started in 2010, the Symposium is organized by the Finger Lakes Faculty Development Network (FLFDN) as a part of Ithaca College’s Annual Educational Technology Day. The sessions will present innovative uses of both established and new technologies for teaching and learning and focus on best practices in the use of technologies and pedagogies, as well as scholarship that assesses the impact of technology on student learning.
Tim Reynolds, Assistant Professor, Ithaca College
Social media is an integral part of students’ daily lives, with college-aged learners engaging with platforms multiple times per day and accumulating significant screen time. Rather than viewing this solely as a distraction, educators have an opportunity to leverage social media as an adjunct to traditional teaching. This presentation explores the use of social media as a tool to enhance student learning opportunities in higher education.
This presentation will highlight how short-form video content can increase student motivation, engagement, and curiosity while supporting multimodal learning. Social media-based “Extra Learning Opportunities” (ELOs) such as brief lectures and interactive quizzes, allow students to revisit challenging concepts, self-assess understanding, and engage with content asynchronously.
The presentation will include action steps for educators interested in adopting social media for instructional purposes, including planning purposeful content with sustainable, low-cost materials.
Ultimately, this session aims to reframe social media from a passive tool into an active educational strategy that complements traditional instruction and expands learning beyond the classroom.
Peri Nelson-Sukert, Instructional Technology Education Specialist, CiTi BOCES
In 2026, artificial intelligence has moved beyond the "hype" phase to become a vital, reasoning partner in the classroom. At CiTi BOCES and throughout Oswego County, educators are leveraging AI not to replace the teacher, but to replace the administrative drudgery, allowing them to focus on the art of teaching. This presentation explores how staff are "elev-AI-ting" their curriculum through the intentional, teacher-facilitated use of Google Gemini and NotebookLM.
We will showcase real-world examples of creativity in action: from transforming literature into interactive "podcast-style" debates to building multimodal social stories and specialized study guides for adult education. Attendees will discover how to use Gems, customized AI experts, to act as "shoulder partners" for lesson expansion or to create interactive G-AI-mes that turn complex subjects into engaging lessons.
The session includes a deep-dive into Gemini and Gems and NotebookLM, and a peek into AI Studio.
Join us for an interactive experience using these tools and leave with practical strategies to guide AI as a collaborative tool for both teacher productivity and student success.
Pat McKeon, Professor, Ithaca College
Carrie Royse, Nurse Manager, Strong Surgical Center, University of Rochester
Rebecca Vincent, Assistant Director of Perianesthesia Nursing, Strong Memorial Hospital, University of Rochester
Deborah Wuest, Professor, Ithaca College
Simulation is ever evolving in health professions education as a means of exposing students to both common and rare clinical situations. However, many programs face resource constraints that limit the integration of simulation into their clinical education, particularly around the design and development of meaningful experiences. Creating simulation experiences can be a daunting task, especially for faculty unfamiliar with instructional design for simulation. In this presentation, we introduce a synthesized framework for creating meaningful, resource-friendly simulations by integrating three complementary models: the EPICS framework (Expertise, Purpose, Interaction, Critique, Sharing) for prompt engineering in artificial intelligence (AI), the ADDIE instructional design model (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) for structuring the development process, and the International Nursing Association of Clinical Simulation and Learning (INACSL) Healthcare Simulation Standards of Best Practice™ for ensuring simulation quality. This synthesized approach enables clinical educators to leverage generative AI platforms to create customizable, standards-aligned simulations tailored to their specific educational needs. Our goal is to guide participants through this integrated framework so they can confidently design and implement AI-informed simulations that promote clinical reasoning, critical appraisal of information, and professional decision making.
Pat McKeon, Professor, Ithaca College
Carrie Royse, Nurse Manager, Strong Surgical Center, University of Rochester
Rebecca Vincent, Assistant Director of Perianesthesia Nursing, Strong Memorial Hospital, University of Rochester
Deborah Wuest, Professor, Ithaca College
Building on the synthesized framework introduced in Part 1, this presentation demonstrates how the integrated EPICS–ADDIE–INACSL approach has been applied to develop AI-informed simulations for nursing staff at a large hospital. In clinical practice settings, ensuring staff readiness across critical competency areas—including interprofessional communication, onboarding and orientation, and critical incident response—demands simulation experiences that are both meaningful and efficient to develop. Using the synthesized framework, nursing educators designed targeted, low-fidelity simulations on a generative AI platform to address these practice readiness needs. This presentation walks participants through the design decisions, prompt-engineering strategies, and standards-alignment processes used to create these simulations. We share practical insights from early implementation, including how the framework helped nursing educators who were new to both simulation design and AI navigate the development process with confidence. The second half of the presentation is devoted to facilitated discussion in which participants are invited to share their own experiences with AI in simulation, explore barriers and facilitators to adopting this approach in their programs and institutions, and brainstorm potential applications tailored to their specific educational and clinical contexts. Our goal is to move beyond a single discipline’s experience and foster cross-professional dialogue about how AI-informed simulation can be made accessible, standards-aligned, and adaptable across health professions education and practice settings.
Toby Brown, Senior Instructional Designer, University of Rochester School of Nursing
Tara Serwetnyk, Director, Center for Excellence in Education and Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing, University of Rochester School of Nursing
Joseph Gomulak-Cavicchio, Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing and Educational Innovation Coordinator, University of Rochester School of Nursing
Brian Harrington, Executive Director, Information Technology Services, University of Rochester School of Nursing
Robin Stacy, Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing, University of Rochester School of Nursing
Nadine Taylor, Instructional Designer, University of Rochester School of Nursing
As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms the landscape of healthcare and education, we take a proactive approach to faculty and staff development. This session will highlight the journey of a School of Nursing's AI Community of Practice (CoP) in fostering essential AI literacies among its educators and staff. We will share our model for a bi-weekly, survey- and community-driven training program, focusing on practical skills such as expert prompting, ethical & effective AI tool selection and delegation, and shifting the focus from detecting AI to redesigning assessments and developing robust assignment guidance for students. Our CoP leadership core curates these learning opportunities and makes comprehensive resources available through a dedicated LMS organization, ensuring real-time accessibility and ongoing support. We’ll discuss the wins and lessons learned from fostering GenAI literacy, and provide attendees with a scalable model for building community-led AI initiatives in their own institutions.
Jie Zhang, Professor, SUNY Brockport
Ann Giralico Pearlman, Senior Instructional Designer Emeriti/Adjunct Faculty, SUNY Brockport
In an increasingly artificial intelligence (AI)-driven world, students must learn to communicate, interpret, critically analyze, and evaluate AI tools to navigate its impact on their study, future career, personal lives, and broader society as a whole. In this presentation, we will showcase how AI tools can support the development of students’ critical analysis skills. We will also share experiences integrating AI into assignments that help enhance student self-assessment and reflection skills through AI-powered feedback, aiming to provide students and faculty opportunities to interact and communicate. In addition, we will discuss an adaptable theory-to-practice model to tackle the pedagogical and technological issues encountered with integrating AI into college-level courses.
The purpose of this presentation is to share practical strategies for leveraging AI to enhance student learning. The first example illustrates how students improved homework and deepened learning through constructive feedback provided by AI, self-evaluation, and guided reflection. The second example showcases a collaborative student assignment in which AI was used to create cross-cultural images for advertising campaigns. Students try numerous iterations of interaction with AI and collectively review images created to recognize biases, and assess the societal implications of AI deployment.
Sarah Cross, Instructional Designer, Colgate University
Robin Bridson, Colgate University
Institutions increasingly recognize the importance of inclusive, accessible LMS design, yet faculty often lack direct insight into how students actually experience course sites. The Moodle Design Corps addresses this gap by centering the student voice in LMS design support—without shifting design responsibility onto students or undermining faculty autonomy.
This session introduces a student-informed model that pairs structured student walkthroughs of Moodle course sites with instructional design consultation. Trained student reviewers surface experience-based insights about navigation, clarity, and accessibility, highlighting where students feel supported, where they hesitate, and how they interpret course organization. Instructional designers then translate these insights into optional, actionable design strategies through collaborative consultations.
Attendees will learn how this two-part approach balances authentic student perspective with instructional design expertise, creating a formative, scalable, and faculty-friendly support model. The session will share practical lessons from piloting the Design Corps, including how to recruit and prepare students, frame feedback constructively, address faculty concerns, and share small steps for enhanced LMS usage.
Participants will leave with a transferable framework for engaging students as partners in LMS design.
Andrew Smith, Instructional Designer for Innovative Media, Colgate University
Sarah Cross, Instructional Designer for Learning Platforms and Universal Design, Colgate University
GenAI Jam Sessions are student-centered, co-curricular spaces that function as low-stakes laboratories for observing how learners actually engage with AI—insights that can meaningfully inform classroom teaching. Designed primarily for students, these sessions invite participants into short, playful, and lightly structured experiments with generative AI, emphasizing exploration over mastery and curiosity over polished outcomes.
In this session, we present GenAI Jam Sessions as intentional pedagogical testbeds: environments where the absence of grades, formal assessment, and rigid instructions allows authentic student behaviors to surface. Drawing on patterns observed across multiple sessions, we highlight how students approach prompting, negotiate uncertainty, interpret AI output, and push tools toward creative or unexpected ends when given minimal direction. These behaviors—often obscured in traditional coursework—offer valuable signals for instructors thinking about assignment design, scaffolding, and the role of AI in learning.
Rather than focusing on specific tools or technical workflows, this session emphasizes what faculty, instructional staff, and educational developers can learn from student-led AI play. We discuss how insights from these co-curricular spaces can translate into teaching decisions, where translation breaks down, and why maintaining low-stakes environments is particularly productive when working with emerging technologies.
Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how student-centered AI playgrounds can complement formal instruction, serve as informal research-and-development spaces for teaching with AI, and support more reflective, intentional integration of generative technologies into higher education.
Nathan Pritts, Chair, First-Year Writing / Principal Strategist, AI, University of Arizona Global Campus
Will AI replace human creativity, or can it become something more unexpected—a pressure that clarifies rather than diminishes creative judgment? This session explores how educators can guide students to work with AI as a creative partner while maintaining human agency, intention, and voice at the center of the process.
Drawing on historical parallels—particularly William Blake's intervention with printing press technology—the presentation reframes anxieties about AI in education by showing that concerns about technology overwhelming craft and individuality are not new. Blake used the press but refused to let its reproducible output stand alone; he painted over prints, reworked them, and insisted that creativity remain an active human process. This historical lens offers students and faculty a way to understand their own relationship with generative AI: not as replacement for human work, but as a starting point that demands intervention.
The session shares practical approaches for teaching students to recognize when AI output requires revision, how to maintain their own voice and judgment throughout the creative process, and why staying in relationship with their work matters more than speed or polish. Participants will explore how reflective prompts, iterative exercises, and explicit discussions of creative decision-making can help students across disciplines resist treating AI-generated content as finished, instead developing practices that keep human creativity central.
Colleen Countryman, Associate Professor, Ithaca College
Generative AI is rapidly reshaping how students approach creative, analytical, and technical work, yet many instructors are still determining how to integrate these tools in thoughtful, pedagogically-grounded ways. In this session, I will share strategies that leverage the capabilities of generative AI as a pathway to new forms of learning. These approaches use AI to open opportunities that wouldn’t be available otherwise within the constraints of time and prior experience.
In one such case study, we’ll explore an AI-infused unit on songwriting in a Physics of Music course. Designed for students with little prior experience in music composition, the unit lowers barriers to the songwriting process and allows an opportunity for students to discuss how AI works and the ethics around AI-assisted work. We’ll discuss the activities that opened new creative paths for students while aiming to cultivate ethical uses of AI.
I will also share other assignments which involve the critical evaluation of AI-generated artifacts. In one class activity, we’ll discuss how to incorporate a critical evaluation of AI-generated solutions into classroom conversations. In another, students in upper-level research settings engage in “vibe coding” projects, using AI-assisted coding practices to lower technical programmatic barriers so they can focus more deeply on physical modeling and instructional design practices.
Survey data and classroom observations suggest that structured exposure to generative AI paired with ethical framing and reflective practice can provide new learning opportunities while strengthening students’ disciplinary understanding and cultivating responsible AI tool use. Participants will leave with adaptable strategies for integrating generative AI across disciplines, including methods for scaffolding evaluation skills, facilitating ethical debate, and designing assignments that emphasize creativity, rigor, and student agency.
This work was made possible through the support of an Ithaca College AI Mini-Grant.
Jenna Sadue, Assistant Director, Rochester Institute of Technology
Cana Fuest, Instructional Designer, Rochester Institute of Technology
As artificial intelligence continues to shape the higher education landscape, faculty need more than awareness of AI tools. They need AI literacy that is grounded in sound pedagogy, ethics, and institutional priorities. AI Essentials for Educators is a six-week professional development course designed at the Rochester Institute of Technology to help faculty build confidence and competence in teaching and learning with AI. The course is modeled after the EDUCAUSE Faculty AI Literacy in Teaching and Learning Framework and focuses on four key competencies: technical understanding, evaluative skills, practical application, and ethical considerations.
In this session, we will share how the course was designed, including the reasoning behind its structure and the value of aligning with the EDUCAUSE framework. We will discuss lessons learned from implementation, strategies for engaging faculty across disciplines, and examples of how reflective practice supported both confidence and curiosity around AI. Attendees will leave with some ideas for creating their own AI literacy initiatives at their campuses within faculty development contexts.
Maher Bahloul, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Tompkins Cortland Community College
This workshop explores the design and outcomes of a dynamic learning experience where storyboarding bridges traditional art with digital technology. This activity mandates that participants blend foundational sketching and coloring with contemporary AI and digital production tools (e.g., via iPads and cameras) in a sequential, scaffolded process. This session will showcase how this practical, multi-stage workflow—including individual and collaborative writing, visual composition, and digital refinement—cultivates a comprehensive and engaging learning experience. We will analyze student-generated short productions to discuss the pedagogical efficacy of integrating low-stakes analog creativity with high-tech digital application.
Questions about the Symposium should be directed to Jenna Linskens, Ithaca College, jlinskens@ithaca.edu.
Questions about Educational Technology Day should be directed to Information Technology at Ithaca College, edtechday@ithaca.edu.
The Finger Lakes Faculty Development Network is an organization linking people involved in faculty development at campuses in central and western New York. Regular meetings rotate among member campuses or are held through web conferencing. Please visit the FLFDN website to become involved.