When it comes to news aggregators, iPad apps suffer from an embarrassment of riches.  There are several truly excellent aggregators, each with its own take on algorithmically generated news for you.  In this post I will take a look at the leaders and you can decide for yourself which, if any, you might wish to install.  I will not be covering stand-alone publishing enterprises, like the New York Times or Time Magazine apps, but rather meta-tools that aggregate articles from these and many other news sources.  I have stretched my definition to include Reuters and AP, which technically are news sources,...

This week I’d like to draw some attention to the Course Copy tool within Blackboard. True, y’all are pretty familiar with using that tool to duplicate materials into a new semester course, but there are some nuances to the course copy settings that you may be unaware of. First off, recall that you do want to start a course copy from the course with the material. In terms of “getting next semester ready” that means go into the OLD course. Under Packages & Utilities on the Control Panel you can go to the Course Copy tool. Here at Palomar we only allow one type of course copy...

No, really. It may be March, but Summer is here already. At least, it is within Blackboard. In accordance with our typical course lifecycle, the Summer 2013 courses have just become available for faculty development on the production Blackboard environment. Feel free to begin copying materials, setting up due dates, and all the other “pre-semester” prep that a new semester brings. Just remember that, even once students start enrolling in your class, they won’t even SEE your Blackboard course until and unless you make the course available to students. Summer is here! So… get to...

Have you ever had content that you want students to opt-in to receive, but you don’t want students able to opt-out of as the Review Status tool allows? Naturally the Adaptive Release tool will be the key to making Blackboard show the content, but what criteria could allow students to opt-in without being able to reverse the process? Groups. But not just any old Group type; I’m talking specifically about Sign-up Only groups, in which students may sign up to include their name on the group list (so that YOU don’t have to assign them to the group). Then all you would need to do is set...

Blackboard is introducing an improvement to the Assignment tool, which I suspect faculty will be quite pleased with. The Assignment tool, as you hopefully are already aware, is the component which allows students to submit files for the instructor to review, grade, and give feedback to the student. Assignments can take almost any type of file, and Inline Assignment Grading can convert, display, and annotate Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF file formats. In fact, between Office documents and PDFs, that’s 95% of all file types submitted via Assignments on Blackboard’s hosted systems, and I...

As you build a Camtasia project, you may import resources stored in various places on your file system, including different formats of video files, graphics, audio files, and so on.  You will also make many edits, adding callouts, zoom-and-pan features, animations and the like.  When you save your project as a camproj file pointers to all these resources and the location and details of all your edits will be saved in the file, so you simply need to double-click the camproj file later and it will invoke the Camtasia Studio editor with your project laid out just as you left it.  At some point, however,...

Is there anything in your Blackboard course that you really don’t want students to have until after they’ve read something else already in the course? In that case, let me introduce you to my two friends Adaptive Release and Review Status. Review Status is a simple control that can be enabled on any piece of content within one of your content areas, which offers students a button to click to indicate they have reviewed that content. Think of it as a “yes, I did that” button, which could be used by itself to let students check things off as they work through your list of...

Those responsible for reading and commenting on student papers know that there are certain comments that get made over and over.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to store these in Word, and insert them into the student paper (or a Review annotation to the student paper) with a single keystroke?  There is with Quick Parts and Macros.  This post demonstrates how. Quick Parts First, open a Word document and type the comments you typically enter on student papers.  You may want to save this document and add to it as you think of others later.  To make quick parts out of each of your...

Blackboard’s testing tool has an option to allow multiple test attempts, either unlimited attempts or up to a specified number of attempts. This means that once a student has taken the test a first time, they will  have the opportunity to go back, click the test link again, and try another time. However, a goodly amount of the time, students do not correctly navigate into the test for their second attempt, but instead end up in a frustrating look of viewing the test, saying to Begin the test, and looking at their results from the first attempt. The trick, as much as their is one, is to read the...

I will be conducting a workshop Friday on how to capture and produce video in Camtasia.  Camtasia is the state-of-the-art screen capture program from TechSmith.  We have licensed it for District computers at our college, and those who do not qualify for the District licenses copy can purchase it for the educational price of $179.  As I say, my workshop is titled How to Capture and Produce video—specifically screencast video—in Camtasia.  It grew out of a workshop I did on how to edit video in Camtasia.  Folks who attended that one wanted more on how to originally get screencast video and what settings...