As the Fall term draws to a close, quite a bit of grading is going on. If you’ve just spent the last two hours at your computer punching in student grades, this might be a good time to back up that work. If you’re already in your course site now, just follow these 6 simple steps to create a grade backup: Go to the “Full Grade Center” view, so you can see the whole grade grid for your course. Over on the upper right of the grid, open up the “Work Offline” menu, then choose “Download”. If you are hiding student grades in the grade grid, be sure to...

Remember 35 millimeter slides? Yeah, me neither. No, really, although most of us don’t have occasion to use slide projectors any more, there are still boxes and carousels of slides floating around out there. Occasionally we in Academic Technology are asked “is there some way to have my slides scanned?” Yes, yes there is. Meet the ImageLab slide scanner. As you can see demonstrated in the video below, this little device makes it easy to digitize any 35 millimeter slides or negatives you have lying around. The scanner outputs JPG files, so there’s no fuss about using non-standard...

So at the end of last week the Palomar Blackboard system went though an upgrade process to the most currently released version of the Blackboard Learn software.  (For version number hounds, we were at 9.1 Service Pack 3, and are now at 9.1 Service Pack 5.)  Most folks would respond to that with a rousing cry of “so what?!”  Here is what Palomar faculty should be aware of regarding this new version of Blackboard: File size limits: For years I’ve been warning faculty about a limit in Blackboard, where course archives and imports over 250 Mb in size would simply not import into a new...

Google labs have recently released a terrific new tool called Google Body that does for human anatomical charts what Google Earth did for wall maps.  Well, not quite, but they could easily get there.  Don’t rush to the site, however, unless you are prepared to install one of the new HTML5/WebGL browsers: Firefox 4 beta or Chrome 9 beta [NOTE: The day I posted this article Chrome 9 came out of beta, so you will find the Chrome 9 production product at this link].  If you have a reasonably robust computer and a good graphics card I recommend you try it, just for the fun of using Google Body. Google...

In handling the hundreds of help requests concomitant to rolling out a new version of Blackboard and beginning a new semester, a typical sub-thread running through the support requests is “I can’t see the documents, or discussion post, or content area…” There may be several reasons.  Let’s take them in order of importance, items 1 & 2 from the student perspective, 3 & 4 from the instructor’s perspective. 1.  I can’t get into Blackboard at all, and my teacher has emailed me saying I have to… Those who cannot login at all must set a new password in...