Teaching with Insight® at a Glance:

• Preserve presentations - Keep a record of your lecture by simply saving image groups for easy reuse and updates
• Go beyond the slide frame - Define your own details by zooming on details and showing side-by-side comparisons without the need for multiple projectors
• Enrich student study materials - Publish digital image lectures online and enhance the learning experience by creating text annotations, links to additional online resources or embed audio and video files

THE PROBLEM: Growing up with the Internet, today's students expect interactive learning tools they can access at anytime from anywhere.

THE SOLUTION: Top institutions throughout the world are incorporating digital resources into their curricula using Luna Imaging's Insight® software.

They report the investment in digital image collections is paying off in terms of enhanced student learning and time savings for professors preparing lectures.

Insight's presentation tool works like a digital slide carousel, allowing educators to select and save groups of images along with associated descriptive data for lectures. Special annotations, image details, side-by-side comparisons and embedding Web site links are just a few of the features in the presentation tool. In addition to offering the opportunity for a more dynamic lecture, presentations can also be saved and shared online with students.

Duke University will begin using Insight in the classroom this fall, and its new digital library is intended to support and eventually help transform teaching and learning, writes Paul Conway, director of information technology services, in the spring/summer issue (http://magazine.lib.duke.edu/issue9/) of the Duke University Library magazine.

"It is widely acknowledged that the Internet has changed forever the way we work together, teach and learn, talk to each other, as well as find, use, create and share information," Conway says. "The Digital Library @ Duke must not simply react to the technological changes swirling around it but anticipate that more and more people will depend on the Internet and expect their learning and teaching needs to be met at least in part through access to information in digital form."

In an article for Library Hi Tech, Barbara Rockenbach from Yale University and Max Marmor, formerly of Yale, reported that in a survey of 400 Yale University students they learned students believe the use of digital collections in support of their courses greatly improved study and comprehension.

"The time is ripe for universities and academic libraries to invest in the infrastructure required for managing digital image collections and integrating them into the fabric of teaching and learning," they conclude.

At Smith College, where Insight supports courses in museum studies and Native American art and architecture courses, student learning is being enhanced, says Daniel Bridgman, Visual Communication Specialist.

"There is great visual literacy when students have access to the collections," Bridgman says. "Students don't learn when they see less."

Instructors also report that use of digital resources is beneficial because it saves time. "Especially the second or third time around," Bridgman says. "This way it's done, and they can just modify their lecture in a fraction of the time."