Penn State Learning Tools for Teaching Week: Explore Top Hat, VoiceThread, LinkedIn Learning

Penn State this week announced a focused, weeklong professional-development push — Learning Tools for Teaching: Explore, Engage, Elevate — that brings campus-supported learning platforms into one place for hands-on demonstrations, pedagogical conversation, and practical workshops designed for faculty and staff eager to deepen digital teaching practices. The event runs Sept. 29 through Oct. 3 in the Dreamery (Shields Building) and pairs vendor specialists with Penn State instructional technologists to spotlight one enterprise platform each day: Top Hat, LinkedIn Learning, VoiceThread, and Microsoft 365 (including Copilot and LTI integrations), culminating in open virtual office hours for follow-up and artifact development.

Overview​

Penn State’s new Learning Tools for Teaching week is positioned as both an introduction and a practical lab for educators who already use, or are considering adopting, institutional learning technologies. The program emphasizes three outcomes: deeper familiarity with campus-supported tools, hands-on skill development in workshop settings, and peer-led sessions that surface instructional best practices. Each day is structured around expert-led presentations followed by interactive workshops and office hours to let participants test features, collect artifacts, and ask product-specific questions. The choice of the Dreamery as the physical hub reinforces the hands-on intent: the Dreamery is a TLT facility on the Shields Building ground floor explicitly designed for experimentation with emerging teaching technologies and active learning configurations. Its flexible furniture, AR/VR assets, and facilitation support create an environment engineered for experimenting with new classroom designs as well as software tools.

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Background: Why a dedicated week for learning tools matters​

Higher-education teaching has shifted from isolated tool adoption toward integrated workflows, where LMS, student-response systems, asynchronous discussion tools, and AI assistants interact to shape assessment, presence, and engagement. When institutions support multiple enterprise platforms, faculty and staff face two major challenges:

• Fragmentation: Tools overlap in capability (polling, discussion, analytics), making informed choices essential.
• Adoption fidelity: Instructors often have surface-level familiarity but not workflow-level competence needed to design effective activities.

Penn State’s event addresses both by creating a low-risk, low-pressure space for practice and exchange. The week’s format — platform overview, pedagogy-focused case studies, guided workshops, and drop-in office hours — mirrors adult learning principles that prioritize immediate applicability and scaffolded practice.

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Day-by-day breakdown and pedagogical implications​

Monday, Sept. 29 — Top Hat: active learning and formative data​

Top Hat serves as Penn State’s enterprise student-response and engagement platform; the week opens with a full program focused on in-class interactivity, polls, quizzes, and content that extends learning outside class. Sessions include live lecturing integrations, strategies to reach distracted learners, and practical approaches for extending engagement beyond the classroom. Faculty office hours and product feedback rounds are scheduled to support immediate iteration. (psu.edu, psu.edu, psu.edu, cei.bd.psu.edu, techcommunity.microsoft.com, psu.edu, learn.microsoft.com, psu.edu, TLT to host first Learning Tools for Teaching: Explore, Engage, Elevate event | Penn State University