myUSF Blackboard News

If you are a friend of Google Calendars, and an owner of a Blackboard course or Organization, this will be useful.

Within Google Calendar is a great feature for embedding calendars on other web pages. As you update your Google Calendar, the web page with the embedded calendar is automatically updated. And what is Blackboard if nothing more than a fancy web page. If you are running a course, it’s easy to put all the important dates in Google Calendar for that course and embed it in your class, so that students can then add the calendar to their own Google Calendars. For Organizations, the same benefit is available for Managers and Members.

Here’s how to embed your calendar on your website:

1. In the calendar list on the left, click the down-arrow next to the calendar you want to embed, and select Calendar settings. (Alternatively, click the Settings link at the bottom of the calendar list, then click the name of the calendar.)

2. Copy the iframe code displayed in the ‘Embed This Calendar’ section.

3. Paste this code into your website to embed your calendar. In Blackboard, this is easily done by Adding an item. Be sure to click the button for HTML source mode, or you’ll be adding the HTML code to your item and not the embedded calendar.

If you’d like to customize your embedded calendar, click the Customize the color, size, and other options link above the iframe field to access the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper. Carefully select your options in the Calendar Helper and paste the customized iframe code in your website.

To display events from multiple calendars in the same embedded calendar, simply follow the instructions above to access the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper. Then, select the checkbox next to each calendar you wish to display, in the section ‘Calendars to Display.’ Keep in mind that because the Weather Calendar pulls data based on your own settings, information from this calendar will not display if embedded on your website.

Please note that you can change the amount of information available on your calendar’s address by clicking the Change sharing settings link in the ‘Calendar Address’ section.

Every time you visit Blackboard, there a friendly greeting awaiting you, something that the administration of USF thinks is important, timely, or interesting to students and faculty.

Part of the Welcome tab that everyone sees after logging it to Blackboard

In the past this message was static. I would put up the message, and it would remain until someone else came along with a new message. It was infrequently updated, and lost it’s impact as a tool for delivering information.

To mix things up, I wrote a new Blackboard extension I’m are calling Message of the Day. This tool maintains a small database of these messages, and randomly displays one each time the Welcome tab is reloaded. The randomization is weighted to that the most recent added messages have an increased chance of being chosen.

There is a function to create a priority message that, while present in the database, will always be chosen over all other messages. Useful when you need a particular message to take precedence and don’t want to take the time to modify the Welcome tab and replace the header module with a different module.

Some of the messages in the database at the time of capture. Two buttons make it easy to add new messages or add a priority message.

Each message is simple HTML. You can link to external images, use CSS to format the content, use A tags to link to outside locations. The tool ships with 6 simple icons that can be used to help ‘brand’ messages if you don’t already have an icon or image elsewhere.

A simple title helps organize messages in the database


Use html to your hearts content. Stock images included along with HTML code to make it dead simple to include

Stuff for Blackboard Admins
This is a new tool intended for the Blackboard administrators out there. Students and faculty probably won’t see or care other than to receive more and more interesting notifications. Administrators at other schools can find this utility in the Blackboard extensions catalog http://extensions.blackboard.com

The recommended way to deploy the module is as the header (via Tab -> Default Layout). This can also remain a regular module.

By popular request, we are pleased to release the first version of our Photo Roster tool. Available to course Instructors and organization Managers, this tool simply presents a roster of the students in your course along with basic contact information and a photograph supplied by the ID Card Center. The tool is available now by going into your course Control Panel and clicking on the Photo Roster link.

If a student as enabled privacy, or we don’t otherwise have a photo from the card center, a picture of Rocky the bull is used instead.

If you are wondering about the value of such a tool, please listen to this anecdote from a student

My undergraduate organic chemistry professor required all 100 students to submit to him a note-card after the first lecture. The note-card had to include a passport photo, name, hobbies and career interests. Amazingly, within two weeks he had memorized everything. When we raised our hands in class, he would address us by our first names. When we visited him during office hours, he would talk to us about our hobbies and if solicited, offer us career advice. This certainly made me feel very good that my professor actually CARES about me as a person!

Students

If you are concerned about having your photos available to the Instructor, Students have the right to have this suppressed. You can update your privacy settings in OASIS. The University Registrar provides an online tool for understanding and updating student privacy settings (https://www.registrar.usf.edu/privacy/).

USF considers photographic image to be “directory information” from a student privacy perspective.

For details, please see the USF Regulation USF2.0021 at:
http://usfweb2.usf.edu/usfgc/ogc%20web/currentregs/USF2-0021.htm

This is in compliance with state and federal privacy requirements.

Update Feb 18, 2009
A button was added to provide a Print View to the Photo Roster. Clicking the Print View button will open a new page that is formatted properly for easy printing.

Update Aug 12, 2009
I added two new print buttons to the Photo Roster. The first works much like the original print, showing the photo along with the name and email address of each student, just cleaned up a bit.

The second print button is a much more compact print with just the name and USFID of each student, no photos. This new print is more suitable for bringing to class and using to take attendance. Like always, the photo roster is an up-to-date listing of the students registered in your class.

I also added an image to help “brand” the tool. Enjoy

If you are a department or adviser looking for a new way to maintain communication with your constituents, we are pleased to offer Blackboard Organizations populated with the students for every College, Department, and Major in OASIS Banner. We’ve set up an automatic process that reads students College, Department, and Major codes from Banner and adds them as members of corresponding organizations in Blackboard. The lists are maintained so that as students change majors or graduate, they are added and removed from the organizations, ensuring your organization roster remains current.

These sites are full-fledged Blackboard sites. They are very useful for sending email to the students you advise, and can also be used to make available departmental documents such as program requirements, graduation applications, course authorization request forms, and any other departmental paperwork you maintain. A discussion board is available to foster communication amongst your charges. File uploads, announcements, surveys, everything you can do in a Blackboard course you can do here.

We have four levels of organizations available:

Majors: For every major code in OASIS we create an Organization, and populate it with students that have that major code. These would be most appropriate for advisers and chairs.

Departments: For every department listed in OASIS, we create another Blackboard organization. In many cases, there is a one to one relation between majors and departments, ie, a department only offers one major, but there are many cases there a department offers multiple majors. In those cases, a Departmental organization would be convenient for communicating with all the majors in that department at one time.

Colleges: For each college in OASIS, we create yet another Blackboard organization. These are collections of departments, and are appropriate for the Dean’s office of each college.

Lastly, we create three flavors of each of the above organizations
one with just undergrad students
one with just grad students
one that combines both grad and undergrad students

By default, these organization sites are invisible to students until a department takes ownership and makes it available.

If you or your college or department is interested in one or more of these organizations, please contact us.

help@usf.edu

The AOI WYSIWYG is a third-party building block that Academic Computing installed 5 years ago for Blackboard 6.0.11. AOI stopped developing and supporting the tool when they went out of business around the time of Blackboard 6.3. Even though it continued to function at this time, Academic Computing marked the tool as deprecated. With Blackboard 7.1, Blackboard supplied their own WYSIWYG editor, the Visual Text Box Editor (VTBE) for users of Internet Explorer, and with 7.2, the VTBE is available to all web browsers.

The AOI tool is broken in Blackboard 7.2 due to incompatibilities with the latest version. Clicking Modify to try an edit an AOI document returns the following error message:

Anyone using AOI should have received an email with suggestions on migrating the content in their AOI documents to the Blackboard WYSIWYG tool. In a nutshell, copy and paste the content from your AOI document into the VTBE, and most of the formating should be preserved. Any links to content or file attachments will need to be recreated.

Please contact the Academic Computing Helpdesk at 974-1222 if you would like help migrating AOI documents.

Thanks to a joint effort between Seneca College and USF Academic Computing, we’re pleased to release an interesting alternative to the standard Blackboard Course List module. My Course Plus provides a new way to organize the display of your courses, and shortcuts into your most frequently accessed course tools.

First of all, courses are grouped by semester. As detailed in this article on MyUSF Course ID’s, each folder is identified by it’s 3 character semester and year designator. Clicking the plus or minus will expand or collapse the list of courses for that semester.

Quick Tools

Each course has an icon to the left, which when clicked, will expose a couple of additional links. Clicking these links will take you directly to certain areas of your course. Shortcuts are available to take you directly to your Discussion Board, Gradebook, Announcements, or the Control Panel.

Click the button to expose quick access tools

Quickly go into your Discussion Board, Gradebook, Announcements, or Control Panel

Students also have access to My Course Plus. The view is a little different, do to the lack of privileged functions available to students.

Everyone is welcome to add the module to any of the MyUSF tabs that allow modules. Personally, I recommend adding it to the Courses tab, and modifying the page layout so My Course Plus is in the top right position.

Have fun and post comments on this tool below.

USF Academic Computing has renewed it’s license for Learning Objects - Campus Pack software. This suite of tools is integrated with your MyUSF courses. New this year: Podcasting.

Sample podcast subscription screen, complete with simple RSS subscription and quick iTunes subscription link

An instructor creates a podcast and adds episodes with the same few steps needed to add other content to his course. With one click, an instructor can generate an RSS link to the podcast. Students have the convenience of accessing recordings either from within the course or offline. A quick drag-and drop of the RSS link establishes the subscription to the RSS feed. Episodes are then automatically downloaded to the student’s portable device.

To add a new Podcast Episode, go into any content area of your course, and select to add a Podcast Episode from the pulldown menu on the right.

To subscribe to your courses podcast, go into the course tools page, then click the Podcast page. In here you’ll see links to the RSS feed and a shortcut to quickly add the RSS feed to iTunes.

Only three clicks to subscribe to a podcast. (third click not shown)

Podcast LX is currently available to any MyUSF course or organizations.

USF Academic Computing has secured a site-license so that all USF instructors can use Respondus StudyMate product. Here are a whole bunch of good reasons to give StudyMate a try

1. Create Flash-based activities and games using an “offline” Windows interface
2. Create activities for use on iPods, Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) and other small screen devices
3. Four templates let you create ten activities and games (view sample activities here)
4. Import existing content from Respondus, MS Word, rich-text, IMS QTI, and other formats
5. Download publisher test banks for use with StudyMate from the Respondus Test Bank Network
6. “Spell check” an entire file (includes dictionaries for American English, Canadian English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, and a comprehensive medical dictionary)
7. Insert graphics such as gif, jpeg, bmp, png, and pcx
8. Embed audio files such as mp3 or wav
9. Convert oversized graphics to a suitable size with one click
10. Create algorithmic questions using the “Calculated” template
11. Insert mathematical and scientific symbols using the built-in Equation Editor or MathType
12. Add links to content on other servers with the Web Link tool
13. Use the Quick Copy Wizard to quickly assemble activities from existing StudyMate files or publisher test banks
14. Randomize questions and answer choices so the activity is different each time it’s started

This tool is prepaid for all USF instructors.

To get the software, log into MyUSF, and add the module “Respondus Products” to your MyUSF Tab. This module is only available to USF instructors assigned to teach according to Oasis, so if you don’t see the module, that’s probably why.

License password for StudyMate is in the comments when you download the file

There’s lots of documentation and tutorials, like this movie, available on the Respondus web site

Working with Grand Rapids Community College, Seton Hall University, the University of South Florida Academic Computing and other clients, Blackboard has focused Release 7.2 on Student Achievement, providing major new functionality to:

• Alert faculty and advisors early on to trends in student performance, and enable them to communicate with students to take appropriate action;
• Enable faculty, tutors, and other advisors to carefully observe and improve student performance; and
• Increase flexibility for all users to access, manage, and organize content and Portfolios.

These new tools are available to all instructors/managers of any course or organization within MyUSF. Look for them in your Control Panel.

Click either tool to get started

Documentation will be linked to here, shortly.