What’s New in Blackboard These Days?

Posted on May 3, 2012 by lfarina

An upgrade to Blackboard will be taking place on May 10, 2012 when we will be going from Bb 9.1.6 to 9.1.8.  You should not notice any significant changes to the functionality of the system, but what you will notice is a cleaner interface and a few new features.  What does this mean?  The most apparent change will be the missing editing icons that allow users to drag-and-drop, access, make changes and add content to their course.  These functionalities, of course, will remain but will be replaced by rollover editing, meaning that editing icons are visible only when your mouse cursor hovers over certain areas.  The result will be a cleaner, less cluttered, and contemporary interface.  Check out this short video to see an example of what you can expect.

  Bb 9.1.8 – The New Look

Here are some of the new features you can also look forward to:

  • Course Structures and Themes:  You now have the option of building your course using a set-up wizard.  Choose a name, description and design for your course as well as a pedagogically based course structure.  Here are just some of your course structure options:  Activity Focus – Case Study, Constructivism, Experiential Learning, Lab Format.  Communication Focus – Cooperative Learning, Guided Discussion, Social Learning.  Content Focus – By Chapter, By Lesson, By Module, By Subject.  These structures re-align the left navigation to match the pedagogical needs of the particular course type.
  • Course-to-Course Navigation:  When in one course you can now easily go to another course to access the same page/tool.  For example, if you are in one course’s Grade Center, you can jump to the next course’s Grade Center easily to complete your grading tasks.  As a student, you can jump from one course’s announcement page to another.
  • Course Availability Is Now Posted At The Top Of All Course Pages:  If your course is not available to your students a message will be posted at the top of your course page.  This will quickly allow you to see if your students have access to your course or not.  
  • More Tools Available in Content Area:  When adding a tool to a content area you now have a much wider selection to choose from.
  • Automatic Regrading:   Instructors can now fix problematic test questions by simply editing the invalid question directly and having all necessary updates flow automatically to the Grade Center.  For any given question, Blackboard now allows instructors to drop, give full credit, change point value, or change the correct answer.  After the question has been updated, Bb recalculates the score of all submitted assessments that included the updated question, reflects the updates in the Grade Center, and provides notification to both the instructor and optionally to the student for all impacted submission.
  • New Detailed Activity Reports:  Improved reporting!  Get much more information about your Bb courses and how much time students are spending in particular areas.

Check out these short video clips for more information about some of the new features:

 Course-to-Course Navigation       Course Reports         Automatic Regrading
 Information and videos provided by Blackboard
Posted in blackboard | Leave a comment

Pinterest and Visual Research

Posted on April 20, 2012 by jdarrow

imageIn Celine Perron’s “Design for The Performing Arts” class, students learn about scene design construction, lighting, and the nuances that make a design effective. The course demands that students think visually, a new concept for many which posed some challenges for Celine. How could she help students find the connection between the text book, the visual research she assigned, and the visual impact of their own scene design? At first she went the traditional route:

“For the first project they did visual research on their own, the traditional way. It was important that the image wasn’t pixelated because they would fail. It had to be a high resolution and they had to give me the site address. So instead of them showing me the actual image, I had all these links and it became very cumbersome on my part to click on all the links and try to figure out what they were seeing. And there was no annotation and so I still didn’t know why they were looking at that image.”

Without this information, Celine had a difficult time determining if students understood the relationship between the visual they submitted and subtleties such as the focus of the lighting, the intentional placement of objects, and the contrast of the background with the foreground. Students, it seemed, were having some difficulty making the connection from the theoretical to the design.

”I had to find a better way for them (students) to find the connection between visual research and what they’re designing. I’ve been searching for that solution for a while…. And then one of my students from my 493 class introduced me to Pinterest just for social purposes. And then it hit me, this is what I need to do! This is what I’ve been looking for.”

Pinterest is the digital version of the community bulletin board where people ‘pin’ flyers, announcements or other things of interest. Forbes Magazine describes it this way: “Users employ a “bookmarklet” button installed in their browser to pin images to virtual boards, usually according to a particular theme or purpose. Each image is backed by a click-through link leading to the web page where it was discovered. Users can also check out boards created by others and “like,” “repin” or comment on what they find. Simple hasn’t hurt Pinterest, though—in fact, it’s half the appeal. Pinterest is easy to use, easy to browse and offers such a wide range of content that almost everyone can find something to enjoy.”

The visual focus of Pinterest and the ability to comment on images was the piece Celine had been seeking. Students include the reasons why they chose a particular image, providing her with insight into their decision process. With this information she could provide immediate feedback,

“I could actually push them immediately to the next level to understand why these images are exciting and which ones are for another project for another day…I took pictures of their design models and you can clearly see the connection between what they chose to do in the model with the research they did. Connections happened so I was super excited! The results are night and day between this class that used Pininterest for visual research because of the comments and feedback before they started to use the images. So I think for me Pinterest is the way to go for visual research.”

Pinterest is free but as of April, 2012, you have to apply to become a member or get an invitation from someone with an account: http://pinterest.com/

Arthur, Lisa. “Pinterest: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 03 Apr. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaarthur/2012/04/03/pinterest-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

Posted in images, tool, web 2.0 | 1 Comment

The Secret Revolution

Posted on March 16, 2012 by jdarrow

Twitter, Jing, Google Sites, and SmartPens were just a few of the technologies showcased at last month’s Secret Revolution Faculty Showcase. The turnout was good and the feedback was even better. But what was it that raised enough curiosity to have people jazzed up about applications as simple as Jing?

 

Let’s reframe the focus from: Twitter, Jing, Google Sites, and SmartPens and instead focus on  engagement, feedback, collaboration, and explanation. Technology enables all of this to occur but not until it’s framed around classroom practice does the utility become so obvious. Take for instance, the use of Jing, a free screencasting tool that allows users to capture up to 5 minutes of audio and video of their computer screen. When it was presented as a tool for providing student feedback on written assignments the room began to buzz with possible ways it could be used in various disciplines. Broadcast Journalism Professor, Chad Nye, saw immediate application and is now using it to give his students precise feedback on student produced video clips. With Jing he is able to focus students attention to a peaked audio track while also sharing ideas for better shot selection. This kind of individualized feedback was nearly impossible to do in written form.

Technologies like Twitter and Smartpens aren’t a secret and they’re not even that revolutionary but when re-framed around student feedback and engagement, the possibilities seem like they are.

CELT did capture some of the presentations and have posted them here.

Posted in collaboration, Google, pedagogy, rich media, screencast, tool | Leave a comment