August 2008 Archives

The Fall semester is upon us and it's time to whip your course into shape! Get ready for the TLT Center's Fall Boot Camp 2008. This year's Boot Camp will take place September 15th - 18th and 22nd - 25th and will feature 12 unique sessions on topics that are relevant to teaching and learning. Each workshop will be offered twice to accommodate your busy schedule. Prizes will be given to faculty members with the highest attendance to Boot Camp! Follow the link below to see the full schedule and to register:

What is RSS?
RSS (aka Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web commonly utilized by news and blog sites.

Below is a YouTube video created by CommonCraft that explains the ins and outs of utilizing RSS:

Prepare for the upcoming semester by attending sessions on using Blackboard.

Blackboard 8 - New Features focuses on the Grade Center (formally the grade book).

Preparing Your Blackboard Course focuses on using Blackboard to organizing your documents with the Content System, communicating with students via Announcements & e-Mail, setting up regular assignments & safe assignments, organizing online discussions and much more.

BlackBoard 8 - New Features
08/25/2008 10:00 AM Register

Preparing Your BlackBoard Course
08/25/2008 01:00 PM Register

Preparing Your BlackBoard Course
08/26/2008 10:00 AM Register

BlackBoard 8 - New Features
08/26/2008 01:00 PM Register

BlackBoard 8 - New Features
08/27/2008 10:00 AM Register

Preparing Your BlackBoard Course
08/27/2008 01:00 PM Register

BlackBoard 8 - New Features
09/02/2008 10:00 AM Register

Preparing Your BlackBoard Course
09/02/2008 01:00 PM Register

Dr. Ed Jones, Associate Professor of English, was awarded a 2008-2009 Faculty Innovation Grant. The FIG project involved seven students who had just completed their freshman year. The goal for the students was to create digital stories illustrating "conversion" or "aha" moments during the first-year writing program. The finished digital stories will be used as a resource for the incoming freshman class and the English faculty.

Students created their digital stories using Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0, both of which are part of the standard software on the new laptops (T61 and X61).

In total, the students spent five days planning, writing, revising, conducting personal and peer review, locating resources, taking photos, and building and editing in Elements and Photoshop. When they were finished, students converted their final digital stories to video format. Below are two examples:

A link to all of the digital stories has been placed on the English 1201 website. Click on Digital stories of first-year writing experience to see all of the wonderful student projects.

We have successfully upgraded from version 7.3 to Blackboard 8.

Blackboard 8 brings two major feature enhancements: The Grade Center (formerly known as the gradebook) and student Self/Peer Assessments. For more information and resources to make the transition as smooth as possible, click here.

At one of our recent Technology Summer Series days, Developing Critical Thinkers ... Chris Shamberg called my attention to a free tool that is a plug-in for Microsoft Office PowerPoint called authorPOINT LITE. This application will allow you to share your presentations online through a free online presentation sharing platform called authorSTREAM. Through this process, your PowerPoint presentation is converted to a Flash format. You have the options to make your presentation "public" or "private". The private option lets you share presentations securely with only registered users that you invite through a web link. Of course, registration is free.

Cheating on exams, activities and plagiarized papers are always a concern for those teaching online courses. Is there anything we can do to prevent or reduce the temptation of cheating? The good news is yes; there are things we can do to build an environment in which students are less likely to cheat. The bad news is it takes a little more work on our part and it's not 100% fail proof. Studies have shown there are many reasons why students cheat, ranging from trying to maintain their scholarship, task overload and external factors (family, work, life pressures, time management). How can we foster academic honesty in our classes? While there are several models for plagiarism prevention, they all have three things in common. It is important to note that these items are also best practices when building an online course.

Diigo is a Web 2.0 tool that allows you to highlight and share your web references. This is a great research tool and makes it easier to retrieve specific information on web pages. With Diigo, you can go beyond bookmarking and saving favorites. To learn more, watch the following video:

On Sunday, August 10, the Department of Information Technology will upgrade MyWeb.shu.edu (Blackboard) to the version 8, latest release,). The upgrade will require Blackboard to be unavailable for use on Sunday, August 10, 2008 during the normal maintenance window of 12:01 AM through 8:00 AM. There will be access to webmail but not Banner during this upgrade period.

Blackboard 8 brings two major feature enhancements: The Grade Center (formerly known as the gradebook) and student Self/Peer Assessments. For more information and resources to make the transition as smooth as possible, click here.