Bb 9 - Adding Tools to the Course Menu

Blackboard has created a 2 minute video showing how to add a Blackboard tool, such as My Grades, Announcements, Discussion Board, or Blog to your course menu in Blackboard 9.  As you'll see, it's a completely different way of doing things than in Bb 8.

To quickly find all my posts about Bb 9 you can go to http://cuyamaca-online.blogspot.com/search/label/Bb9.

Cool Tools to Improve Online Communication

This week I found two tools that can help you improve communications with your students. 

The first tool is called Broadtexter.  Broadtexter allows you to contact a group of people (a.k.a. students) by sending text messages en masse to their cell phones.  We all know that the primary communication device for our students is their cell phones.  With this website, you get a Flash widget that you can embed into a Blackboard item or web page that students can use to sign up with their cell phone numbers.  You can also use this same widget to send them messages.  I can see a lot of uses for this in an online class such as sending reminders that tests or assignments are due.  This could also be used to send announcements to students about upcoming events that your student group or organization is offering.

The second tool is called EditGrid which allows you to embed a spreadsheet that can be edited live by several people at once from within a Blackboard content item.  This blog post by Melissa Koenig from DePaul University shows how to use EditGrid to creat a virtual sign-up sheet right in Bb.

Bb 9 - Adding Content Areas

The steps to create content areas in Bb 9 have changed quite a bit.  Please take a look at this 2:30 minute  video to see how to add content areas in Blackboard 9.

How to Help Your Students with Computer Problems

Solving computer problems can be like trying to thread a needle in the dark if you can't see what the person you're trying to help sees on their computer.  ShowMeWhatsWrong.com is a new tool being offered for free that will help you help your students with computer problems.  It will generate a URL so students can send you instant screen recordings. Watch a demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNqO_uKui6s

I took the URL they gave me, and turned it into a tinyurl.com link that is easier to remember.  Now whenever anyone is having a problem with their computer, I can just send them my URL at http://tinyurl.com/showrhonda and they can record their screen to show me what the problem is.  When they're done recording, the site sends me an email telling me the video is ready to be reviewed and who sent it.

They've made it very easy to use and dead simple for both the student and the instructor.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million.  This is a great resource that I highly recommend.

Bb 9 - @ONE Lunchtime Series

@ONE is offering three Blackboard 9 online workshops that you can watch at lunchtime.  If that time doesn't work for you, you can watch the recording at a later time.  Here is the signup information:

1. What's New on Blackboard 9: Getting Acquainted
   Wed, 03/03/2010 - 12:00pm
2. What's New on Blackboard 9: Increase Student Retention and Establish Community with Communication and Collaboration Tools
   Wed, 03/10/2010 - 12:00pm
3. What's New on Blackboard 9: Increase Student Success with Blackboard Performance Monitoring Tools
   Wed, 03/17/2010 - 12:00pm

Bb 9 - Course Environment

This week I'd like you to watch a 5 minute video that demonstrates some of the new features in Blackboard 9.  This video will introduce you to the new look and feel of Bb 9 which will be the biggest challenge when we upgrade.

For those of you that missed my blog post last week, we will be upgrading to version 9 during the break between Spring 2010 and Summer 2010.  I will be posting regularly with resources that will help you transition from Bb 8 to Bb 9.

Each of these Bb 9 posts will be tagged with "Bb9" so that you can review them all on one page by going to this blog and clicking on the Bb9 link in the Categories section on the right hand side of the page.

Blackboard 9

A question that came up at both of my Blackboard FAQs workshops during Professional Development week was, "When are we going to upgrade to the new version of Blackboard?"

At this time, we anticipate moving to the next version of Blackboard, which is known as Blackboard 9, or Bb 9, during the break between Spring 2010 and Summer 2010.

I'm often asked, "how big are the changes in Bb 9?"  The best analogy I've heard is that switching to Bb 9 is a lot like switching from Word 2003 to Word 2007 when they added the ribbon.  Word pretty much still did the same thing, but where you found the tools you were used to using was completely different.

The upgrade to Bb 9 will be a lot like that.  It still basically does all the same things it did before; it's just that the way you interact with it will be different.  You will no longer have to go to the Control Panel to make a lot of your changes.

I am planning on offering workshops in Bb 9 later in the semester.  I think it will be helpful to start everyone thinking about this now and will begin regularly posting to this blog about the new features.  The first resource I will give you is a video overview of Bb 9 that was created by Blackboard.

Please ask any of your colleagues who are not subscribed to this blog to do so, so they can get this information as well. Just have them go to http://cuyamaca-online.blogspot.com/ and put their email address in the email subscription box on the right side.

A Gift for You

As my last gift of the semester, I would like to introduce you to Google Voice (GV).  The best way to describe Google Voice is to tell you what it can do for you as faculty members.  Have you ever wanted to give your students a phone number, but didn't want to give out your home or cell number?  You also may have wanted to be able to answer that number at certain times, from certain people, but other people and other times, have it just go directly to voice mail.  You might also have needed to call students who are taking your online classes in other areas, but you didn't want to have to pay the long distance phone charges to do so.

You can do all this and more with Google Voice.  Please take one minute to view this brief video about GV. 

When you sign up for GV, you will be given a new phone number you can give to your students and only have it ring your phone(s) when it is convenient for you.  If it is a family member calling, you can have GV ring all your phones, anytime of day, just to make sure they can reach you.  When you have forwarding turned off, GV will record the message and even attempt to transcribe it, although it does a pretty poor job of the transcription.  Computers just haven't gotten voice-to-text conversion for the masses down yet.

Here are some other things GV does:

• You can send and receive unlimited text messages for free.
• You can have a different voicemail greeting for different callers
• You can screen callers
• You can block numbers
• You can have callers record their names for your approval
• You can have certain contacts only forwarded to certain phones
• You can record calls for later listening, and have them transcribed into text. (You can't record calls that you've placed, just calls that you've received. And every time you initiate recording, GV notifies the other person on the line.)

GV is currently "by invitation only."  All that means is that you sign up, and when they have enough computer power to add people, they'll send you an email telling you how to get started.  This typically takes a week or less.  Be sure to check your spam filters.

So don't delay.  Get GV for yourself for the holidays.  Go to https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlevoiceinvite/ and sign up!

For more information if you're not already convinced, go to http://www.google.com/support/voice/.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday and semester break.  I'll be back in the office and ready to help January 11 - 15.  Just pick a time on my schedule that works for you.  During Professional Development Week I will be busy facillitating workshops, so I will not be available that week for individual support or training.  So be sure to catch me the week before or after Flex Week!

Wrap it up and start all over again

At the same time you're wrapping up the Fall Semester, many of you are starting to prepare for the Spring semester.  Below are some reminders that may help you in this process.

Wrap up Fall

• Double-check your Total column to make sure it is totalling correctly.  
  
• Check to make sure you haven't hidden any students that have actually been in the class. 
  
• Make your course unavailable after grades are turned in.  
  
• Backup of your course.
  
  
  
  
  

Prepare for Spring

• Unhide your Spring course containers.
• Follow the link in the ReadMe section of your Spring containers to find out how to copy your courses from the Fall Semester to the Spring Semester.
  
  

Catch Me Now

This is just to let you know that I will not be available from December 19th until January 10th.  If you are going to need help with Blackboard, or more specifically, the Grade Center, as you prepare final grades, contact me before next Friday.

Rhonda

Intersession Accessibility Course

Start 2010 off right with @ONE's offerings.

Creating Accessible Online Courses
starting Jan. 4, 2010
facilitated by Laurie Vasquez
http://onefortraining.org/node/187

Also, check out their Winter/Spring line-up for:

Online Courses
http://onefortraining.org/online-courses

Desktop Seminars
http://onefortraining.org/seminars

More Video Resources

Last week I posted about video resources and some of you let me know about even more resources that are available.

From Diane Palmer, Humanities Instructor:

YouTube EDU (lectures from top universities, tons of subjects)

Annenberg Foundation  (unbelievable range of subjects, sort of dated but ancient Rome is ancient Rome, wonderful lectures)


From Roxane BenVau, Librarian at Grossmont College:

Free Media Resources on the Internet  (Roxane compiled a comprehensive list of video resources in this document!)

Blackboard Exemplary Course Program

The 2010 Blackboard Exemplary Course Program is now open! This program "was born with the goal of identifying and disseminating effective practices for designing engaging online courses. Using a rubric, instructors and course designers can evaluate how well their own course conforms to effective practices for Course Design, Interaction & Collaboration, Assessment and Learner Support. "

You can submit your course for review or volunteer to be a reviewer. To find out more, visit http://www.blackboard.com/ecp.

Winners will be announced in April 2010 and highlighted at BbWorld 2010 in Orlando.

Video Resources

Today I have two excellent resources for those using or interested in using online video for your courses. The first comes from Rick Salisbury from DePaul University who wrote a blog post on Beyond YouTube: Great Places to Find Video for Your Online Course.

The other resource is from the Ohio State University Web Accessibility Center. It provides relatively easy instructions for Captioning YouTube Video and Providing Accessible Controls.

Undelivered email

If you sent out an email to your class through Blackboard, you may have received an email that had the subject "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender." This message is telling you that it tried to send your email to all your students, and one or more of those student email addresses are incorrect. If you look into the body of the message, it will tell you what email addresses caused the problem.

If one of the email addresses causing the problem is update.email@WebAdvisor, that means one or more of your students doesn't have an email address in WebAdvisor.

You can find out which students are affected by going to the Control Panel, clicking on List/Modify Users, then click on the Search button to display all your students. Scan down the list to see who has update.email@WebAdvisor as their email address and give them a phone call.

Any changes made in Blackboard to the email address will be overwritten each night with the information in WebAdvisor, so students need to enter their correct email address in WebAdvisor. You can give students the link to these instructions on How to Your Change Email Address in WebAdvisor.

At the beginning of each semester, it might be a good idea to follow the steps above to scan through your student email addresses and make sure you have valid email addresses for each of them.

Surprising Study Results

Jeremy Tutty has summarized a presentation by Penny Ralston-Berg at the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, titled: “What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective” in a blog post. The results were not what you may expect!

To quote Tutty:

"As expected, students highly valued technology that worked; clear, consistent navigation in their course sites; and instructions on how to access resources. It was what students found least valuable that caught my attention. Based on this survey, online students do not want to:

1. Find course-related content to share with the class
2. Use wikis, shared documents, or other collaborative tools
3. Introduce themselves to the class
4. Coach other students
5. Attend synchronous meetings
6. Interact with games and simulations
7. Work in groups
8. Receive audio or video content

Surprised?"

I know I'm surprised! To find out more, please read his blog post or take a look at the PowerPoint slides of the original presentation.

Learn at Lunch Desktop Seminars

Techsmith recently released the Camtasia screen capture software for the Mac. @ONE is offering a free lunchtime online seminar introducing this new application on Wednesday, September 30th at noon. So if you're a Mac, check it out!

For information on other seminars offered, check out the @ONE website.

Assignment Upload Error - Update

When faculty or students try to upload an assignment in Blackboard, they may get an error message that says, "Please enter a valid file."

I originally posted about this error on August 12th, but it is affecting so many faculty and students that I am updating this information. This error occurs when using Firefox 3.5 or Chrome browsers. I have heard some reports of it happening with Safari as well.

The solution for now is to use IE 7 or Firefox 3.0. If you already have Firefox 3.5 you will need to uninstall it first. You can then upload Firefox 3.0 from these web pages:

Download for PC

Download for MAC

Please forward this information to any of your colleagues that are using Blackboard, but may not be subscribed to this blog.

If you are getting this blog post for the first time, please subscribe! Just go to the Cuyamaca Online Blog and put your email address in the Email Subscription box.

SafeAssign Comments Not Showing to Students

We have just discovered that when you grade a SafeAssignment and make comments to your students, they cannot view these comments through My Grades. This has been reported to Blackboard and we have two temporary workarounds.

One workaround is to make the SafeAssignment available after you have finished grading. This way students could view the assignment and see your comments. You would need to make sure to enter zero points for those students who haven't turned in their work on time so it would be clear if they tried to submit it late.

Another workaround is to enter the comments in Grade Details by clicking on Modify Attempt. I understand that this would require several extra steps and may not be very feasible.

This is a priority issue for Blackboard and we hope to get a fix for this soon.

Guest Speaker for Online Courses

Here's an offer you can't refuse from Kari Wergeland!

To All Online Instructors

Last semester I “visited” one of Cindy Morrin’s online classes as a guest speaker. This was my first attempt at offering a library instruction session online. To get the ball rolling, I started several threads on the discussion forum about various research (information literacy) topics. Then I appeared throughout the rest of the week to answer questions. Cindy jumped in, from time to time, too.

I would be happy to come in to any of your virtual classrooms to help your students become better researchers. My appearance could be geared toward a specific assignment; or I could go over Cuyamaca’s virtual library; or I could cover various search strategies. Of course, I am always open to your suggestions, as well.

If interested, please contact me at kari.wergeland@gcccd.edu or x4412.

If you take Kari up on her offer, here is how you add her as a Guest Speaker for your course:

1. Go to the Cuyamaca College home page
2. In the Online Services menu, click GCCCD Online Classes
3. Click Support for Faculty in the upper right corner
4. Log in with your email username and password
5. Click on Blackboard Course Containers in the left side menu
6. Click ADD an Instructor/Teacher Aide/Workshop Participant/Guest Speaker/Evaluator to a Blackboard container

Or just click this link and log in, but that won’t help you next time you try to remember where this was!
http://www.gcccd.edu/online/faculty_support/courseware/container-req-step-2-add-2009.htm