Ever wish you could assign your students to leave a video recording of themselves presenting something, right into a discussion board post in Blackboard? Ever have a need to quickly record feedback for a student, so that they can review your comments when looking at their grade? Blackboard has a way. Starting with version 9.1 Service Pack 10, a new tool is available which can meet that need. Called, variously, either “Video Everywhere” or “Record from Webcam”, this simple tool leverages the YouTube service to not just allow playback of video (as the YouTube mashup component...

Now that the Spring 2012 semester is in progress, I’d like to draw attention to the series of webinars that we in Academic Technology are conducting this semester. Every Tuesday, at 2 PM (with the exception of during Spring Break), we will conduct an online session on one of a variety of topics. To see a list of upcoming topics, take a look at our ATRC Training Schedule. We are conducting these sessions using the Blackboard Collaborate tool (which is available for faculty to use with students through the Blackboard system), so if you are curious about using that tool you may want to participate...

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...

Today is the last day of our spring 2011 semester, and also commencement day.  Just as the day marks the commencement of our students’ ongoing career and educational journeys, so it marks ours in continuing to support technology enhanced education at Palomar College. This semester has seen many changes in our systems, both technically, referring to back-end configuration and hardware platforms, and in terms of user interfaces.  The changes have all been for the better and have been implemented successfully.  We made a major change in the Blackboard system beginning this semester.  We adopted...

Last night my colleagues and I presented our semi-annual plenary break out on Academic Technology at Palomar College. It was well attended, but necessarily by only a small percentage of the enormous number of adjunct professors employed by the college. As a reference for those who did not attend, here is an encapsulated version. We conducted our workshop using the sandbox AT@PC workshop course we had developed. Each professor at Palomar College has an account on our sandbox system. We set the course up for self-enrollment through the Academic Technology Training course, also on the sandbox system. One...