Please view this video

I was bitten by the email bug again. I put a really cool (IMHO) video on the blog yesterday, but those of you who subscribed by email didn't get to see it. This picture is a screen capture of the beginning of the video.

So please, go to http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20080927222629787 and watch the video. I promise, you'll like it. If you don't, just come to my office and I'll give you a piece of candy!

Once you've watched the video, you'll know why it's important to come to my Blackboard workshop, this Friday, 10/3, at 10am in room H-134. I hope to see you there!

Blackboard Workshop Sneak Preview

I will be giving a Blackboard workshop this Friday, October 3rd, from 10 am to Noon in room H-134. This workshop will begin with important information regarding changes in how course containers are built and how students are enrolled in those containers beginning with the Spring '09 Semester. Here is a sneak preview:




I expect this portion of the workshop to last about 30 minutes, so if you can only come for a short time, please come for that. I won't make you stay for the whole thing!

The next topic will be the Blackboard Grade Center, followed by about 30 minutes for questions and answers about anything in Blackboard. More information about this and other workshops can be found at http://www.cuyamaca.edu/tlc/workshops/default.asp.

I hope to see you there!

Poll Display

If you receive email updates to this blog, you didn't get to see how the PollDaddy.com poll really looks when it is seen as an embedded web page element instead of just a URL. Here is the picture of how the poll looks on the blog page:



And this is how it looked in the email sent to email subscribers last night:

That is quite a difference. So lesson learned. If you really want the poll to look good, it needs to be embedded into a web page.

Got Polls?

With a free account from PollDaddy.com you can create surveys and polls to post to your website, blog and social network profiles. Just don't try to put them into Blackboard, it won't work there. Instead, PollDaddy provides a "Direct Link Method" which gives you a URL to link to from Blackboard or an email.

Example Poll:

Blackboard SafeAssign Downtime Saturday 9/27/08

Blackboard sent out the following announcement:

"Please note that Blackboard SafeAssign TM will be unavailable
while undergoing maintenance on Saturday, September 27. This
maintenance window is part of an update which will include the
following improvements:

- Support for Microsoft Office 2007 (.docx) and OpenOffice (.odt) wordprocessing documents

- Support for use of SafeAssign in Blackboard Community System TM Organizations

- Stability enhancements

- Bug fixes "

Please note that this effects only the SafeAssign tool in Blackboard. All other aspects of Blackboard should function normally on September 27. If you are using SafeAssign for your courses, please notify your students that they will not be able to submit SafeAssignments that day.

Free Engineering Courses Online by Stanford

Stanford's School of Engineering has created "Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE)" which will offer several of this top rated University's Engineering program classes at no charge to students and educators. I don't know about you, but I plan on signing up! I always wanted to go to Stanford.

From their website, "Stanford encourages fellow educators to use Stanford Engineering course materials in their own classrooms. A Creative Commons license allows for free and open use, reuse, adaptation and redistribution of Stanford Engineering Everywhere material."

Initial Course Offerings

Introduction to Computer Science
Programming Methodology
Programming Abstractions
Programming Paradigms

Artificial Intelligence
Introduction to Robotics
Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning

Linear Systems and Optimization
The Fourier Transform and its Applications
Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems
Convex Optimization I
Convex Optimization II

Is this image copied from the web?

If you've given your students an assignment that involves images, how do you know if they created it themselves, or if they copied it from the web? Now there's a way to find out.

TinEye.com is search engine with this purpose in mind. Give it an image, and it will tell you where else that image is on the web, and sometimes, where the original image came from.

Ars Technica has given a thorough review of TinEye that is worth the read.

I tried finding the source of the Einstein picture I use for my Teaching with Blackboard course so I could credit it, but couldn't track it down from the 838 matches TinEye found of it.

Convert a Word document to a Blackboard Test

BYU Idaho has created a tool that allows you to copy and paste a properly formatted Word document into their program. Their program then generates a text file that can be uploaded into the Blackboard Pool Manager. Thanks BYU Idaho!

http://www.byui.edu/onlinelearning/employees/testgen/index.htm

Set Up Meetings or Project Sign-ups

Have you ever been frustrated with the process of trying to find a time when several people can meet? Now setting up meetings are easy with Doodle.ch. For a change, this website doesn't force you to sign up. All you do list the dates and times when you want the event to occur and Doodle.ch will give you a link to send to everyone you want to attend. As each person visits the site and checks off which times they are available, you can see what times are workable.

You can also use this tool to have students sign up for project presentations. Be sure to check out the "PowerDoodle" button for more options. You can set it up so that a person can only select one time, hide everyone's choices and make it time zone sensitive for your out of state students.

The second function on this site is "Make a Choice." You can use this for your classes to have students choose which of a list of projects they want to sign up for. It might also work for having students sign up for groups, or to manage large projects where many people contribute different parts of the project. If you can think of other uses, please post them in the comments.

Improve the quality of YouTube Videos

This tip comes from Lisa Chaddock (Geography). Thanks Lisa!

Many faculty are using YouTube videos to enhance their instruction. You can add the following string of characters to the end of any YouTube url and get the higher definition version if it is available: &fmt=18

It works on many videos if they were originally uploaded in higher quality.

For example:

Compare: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7tJ5GfXksI
with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7tJ5GfXksI&fmt=18

In the second video you can see much more detail in the floor and wood, as well as the robot. This trick doesn't always work (the key is that the video was uploaded in a higher quality originally), but when it does work, it can improve the quality of the YouTube videos you use to enhance instruction.

An alternative to get higher quality video for your classes is to post your video to Vimeo.

Compare: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9z5YxkCZCk&fmt=18
with: http://www.vimeo.com/1620070

For this to work, you need to either record your own video, or find applicable video that is already available in Vimeo.

Subscribe to this blog

I just added a service called FeedBurner to this blog. Now you can get the latest information from this blog right in your email inbox, or if you prefer, through your RSS feed reader. The email subscription service is set to check once a day for any new posts on this blog at about 1 am. If there are new posts, it will send you those posts in an email message. If there are no new posts, it won't send you anything that day. That way even if I get carried away with posting to this blog, you won't get more than one email per day. Don't worry though, under normal circumstances, I plan to post only about once or twice a week.