Dr. Ronald A. Styron, Jr. is currently the Quality Enhancement Plan Director and Professor of Leadership and Teacher Education at the University of South Alabama.  He has received numerous awards including Principal of the Year, Louisiana PTA Educator of Distinction and several outstanding conference research paper awards.  He has received over $3 million in grant awards and has a proven record of publications with 35 refereed articles, a book chapter, and a series of administrator-training manuals. He has also conducted over 90 professional research presentations and 50 speaking engagements.

Dr. Jennifer Styron is an assistant professor at the University of South Alabama. USA, College of Nursing and a Former Research Specialist and Distance Education Coordinator at The University of Southern Mississippi, USA. She has been teaching especially in courses of “Advanced Nursing Research”

She is affiliated to:

American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)
Association for Educational Communications and Technology
Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)
International Institute of Informatics and Systemics (IIIS)
Mid-South Educational Research Association
Society of International Chinese in Educational Technology
Team-Based Learning Collaborative
Transcultural Nursing Society
 
Her Research and Areas of Interests are the following

Nursing Education
Instructional Technology and Design
Electronic Health Record Adoption and Use
Team-Based Learning
Cyberbullying
Interprofessional Education

This presentation will focus on the use of four technologies aimed at fostering student engagement in virtual learning environments. These technologies, the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME), InteDashboard, VoiceThread, and WebEx are deployed in a synchronous virtual learning environment. All four promote active learning and have been found to improve the acquisition and retention of content by promoting meaningful discussion and the sharing of information.