I’m just barely old enough to recall that sound through the speakers of an airplane: “*Ding* You are now free to move about the cabin.” It was never fun to know that I had to stay in one place, even if there wasn’t really any better place to be; sometimes I just wanted to know I could move around. (Of course, nowadays you’re discouraged from ever getting up unless you have to. Grumble grumble, get off my lawn.) I feel the same way when I’m projecting my computer screen through a data projector. I want to move around, but the keyboard and mouse tie me down to the...

As I said in yesterday’s post, we will be consolidating the work of several authors in this blog.  Today I have imported the content from Dr. Haydn Davis’ old WordPress.com blog “Teaching with Technology.”  For years Haydn has contributed a column with the same title to our podcasts and Newsletters, and then beginning in December 2009 his own WordPress blog.  Now his materials have been consolidated in the back catalog of this blog.  Since many of them contain valuable insights, and they may be somewhat difficult to selectively find in our back posts, I have included links here...

Today I undertake explanation of the use of the glossary tool in Blackboard 9, certainly an overlooked part of the program, but do it in combination with a program that we license for faculty and staff members at our school called StudyMate. Along the way we will explore: 1.  Building a glossary in Blackboard 9; 2.  Exporting the glossary file as a tab delimited XLS file; 3.  Importing the XLS file to StudyMate; 4.  Building a flash card activity in StudyMate based on our glossary file; 5.  Saving our flash cards as a flash object (the two uses of “flash” not to be confused); 6.  Zipping...

Our fall 2010 training events will be a combination of tried and true workshops and new workshops prompted by the adoption of Blackboard 9 for the spring 2011 semester.  It is critical that new and established Blackboard users attend one of the “New to Nine” 1-hour workshops, and for those wishing an in-depth Blackboard 9 experience, one, if not all, of the full-day Blackboard 9 events. It is not final final, but nearly so.  Here is our probably training schedule, in brief, for the coming fall semester.  Watch our web site for the formal announcement and final dates/times. Thursday, August...

This is a continuation of my interview with the Academic Technology Systems Administrators about technology planning at Palomar College.  In this part we focus on some rubber meets the road issues like paperless environments, AV technologies, telephony, and lots of other issues.  The written response of the technicians is provided in the post below, and the audio of an interview with them follows the post. Additional Questions for ATRC Staff 1.  Would you support a goal of creating a paperless environment at Palomar College, if it meant that you would not have access to printers and would have to rely...