Flex Week Workshops

You might be interested in attending some of the workshops listed below during Flex Week. All workshops shown here are in room E-206.

There are two workshops of particular interest to online teachers on Tuesday -- "Are you a Distance Educator or Correspondence Educator?" and  "Great Practices in Online Teaching and Lunch Discussion."

You can learn how to capture video recordings of what's on your computer monitor (such as a PowerPoint or even input from a tablet) along with your voice as you lecture in the classroom so that students can review the material after class. This workshop is on Wednesday at 3pm.

Find out more about these workshops at http://www.cuyamaca.edu/professionaldev/schedule.asp.

	Monday
		6:00 pm to 7:30pm	What’s New in Blackboard?
	Tuesday
		10:00 am to 11:00 am	Are you a Distance Educator or Correspondence Educator?
		11:00 am to 1:00 pm	Great Practices in Online Teaching and Lunch Discussion
		2:30 pm to 4:00 pm	Accessibility
		5:30 pm to 7:00 pm	Blackboard I: Getting Started
		7:00 pm to 8:00 pm	Blackboard II: Course Menu and Adding Items
	Wednesday
		1:00 pm to 2:30 pm	What’s New in Blackboard?
		3:00 pm to 4:30 pm	Capture It Live!
		5:30 pm to 7:00 pm	Blackboard III: Grade Center
		7:00 pm to 8:00 pm	Blackboard IV: Tests and Quizzes
		8:00 pm to 8:30 pm	Use Blackboard to Assess SLOs
	Thursday
		4:00 pm to 5:00 pm	Blackboard V: Assignments and SafeAssignments
	Friday
		11:30 am to 12:30 pm	Open Lab

Search for Closed Captioned Videos

You can find videos that are closed captioned by using the Google Advanced Search page. Captions make videos accessible to those who are hard of hearing. Captions also help students whose native language isn't English, since they may find it easier to understand written English than spoken English. Videos used in online courses that are required to pass the course must be captioned. Google has made it easier to find captioned videos using Advanced Search.

To access this, just begin your search as you normally would at google.com.

On the results page, click Videos.

Next click "Advanced Search"

On the Advanced Search page, you can select to show only videos that are closed captioned, have the duration you're looking for,  and a few other options.

 

MS Office 2010 Accessibility Checker

Please follow these directions to make your files accessible to those with disabilities before you do your final save in Microsoft Office 2010. This is just a reminder that making files accessible is not only a good thing to do, we are required to do so by law.

1. Click the File tab.
   
2. Click Info.
   
3. Under Prepare for Sharing, an alert will appear if the Accessibility Checker has found any problems.
   
   
4. If there is an alert, click the Check for Issues button, then click Check Accessibility.
   
   
   
5. 
   You are returned to your file where the Accessibility Checker task pane is open, showing the inspection results.
   
6. Click on a specific issue to see Additional Information and steps you can take to fix or revise the content.
   
   Note:   If the content in the additional information pane in the bottom of the Accessibility Checker is hard to scroll because you can't use the mouse, press F6 to focus on the task pane, tab until the focus is in that area, and then try to scroll with the keyboard.

New in Blackboard 9.1 - Build Content Menus

Today I'll continue my post from Tuesday about the new menus in Blackboard version 9.1. To refresh your memory, here is the new Build Content menu.

File

I covered Item last time, so let's move on to File. As I wrote in an earlier post, Bb 9.1 has an entirely new file system and the file link in this menu is how you would add a link to a file in your course. The video titled "Course Files"  gives an overview of this file sytem, and these Hands-on exercises will show you step-by-step how to use Course files, upload a file to Course Files, and make a link to a file using the file option of the Build Content menu.

Audio

Below is an image of the audio dialog. This option is used to create a link to an audio file that is uploaded into Blackboard. We suggest you use this only for short audio files, say 5 minutes or less. The reason is that large files put too much burden on the Blackboard system and slow it down for everyone. If you have larger files, please save the file to your website file area or iTunes U and link to it using the URL option in the Build Content drop-down. For more information on how to do this, please email me. 

Audio Dialog window:

In step 2 of this audio dialog, please say no to Autostart and Loop in order to meet accessibility guidelines mandated by law. If the audio file you are uploading or linking to is required for your students to succeed in your course, you must also provide a transcript of the audio in step 1.

Image

The Image dialog is pretty straightforward. There is a new option under the Browse Mashups button to load images from Flickr. When adding images, make sure to type a short description of the image in the Alt Text area. This is another accessibility feature that we are mandated to comply with. Use the Long Description if a short description in the Alt Text is not adequate to communicate the meaning of the image. Long Description is not required, only Alt Text is required.

I'll continue covering this Build Content menu in my next post.

eBooks For Your Classes

The U. S. Department of Justice and the U. S. Department of Education have issued a joint letter stating that colleges and universities could not require the use of an eBook reader for classes since they were not fully accessible in accordance with the American Disabilities Act. At this time a fully accessible eBook reader doesn’t exist. You can offer the eBook as an option, but you must also have a fully accessible version available for students requiring an accommodation.