John W. Sipple, an associate professor of education at Cornell, had been teaching the Social and Political Context of American Education (Education 271/571) for seven years and had a smattering of audio and video in his class. But it was always a hassle.

Then he was awarded a 2005 Faculty Innovation in Teaching (FIT) project, which allows faculty to develop innovative instructional technology projects that have the potential to improve the educational process.

That project enabled Sipple to create a database of 2-minute clips from popular movies that are either Hollywood caricatures of public school life or more accurately reflect the challenges facing children, communities, schools and policymakers.

"We're using clips to help students operationalize the theories that we're trying to teach them," he said. "For example, socialization: Schools are socializing kids to certain gender and racial roles, and, in a fun way, movies show what we're trying to teach. The FIT program enabled us to work out the legal issues involved in creating our database."

Sipple also is creating a database of students' personal recollections of their prior school experiences using portable digital audio recorders. Sipple's teaching assistant has downloaded the 60-second recordings into a second database, which now has approximately 300 entries and is searchable.

Billie Jean Isbell, professor emeritus of anthropology and adjunct professor of law, also won a FIT project last year to produce a Web-based virtual tour of Vicos, Peru , where a Cornell-Peru project located in the Cordillera Blanca helped integrate the indigenous population into the market economy.

The project provides a geographical and historical introduction to Vicos, illustrating the history of the project using visual and print materials from the Cornell Vicos archive. The project supports three teaching modules on biodiversity, water management and ecotourism. The virtual tour will be used in Latin American Studies, in a development sociology class that focuses on globalization and in a new anthropology course on anthropology in the real world.

"My FIT project gave me the ability to design a Web-based project that can be universally shared, in Spanish and in English, " Isbell said.

Faculty can now apply now for a 2006 FIT project; the deadline is April 1. An information session for faculty is slated for Thursday, March 2, 3 to 5 p.m., in the ILR Conference Center, room 225.

For more information, e-mail innovprojects@cornell.edu or see http://www.innovation.cornell.edu.

Leslie Intemann is a technical communicator with Cornell Information Technologies (CIT).