CTC Ed Tech News March 31, 2014

Hello everyone,

Looks like March is going out like a lamb… all these sunny days are glorious.

Blackboard Course Shells for Summer and Fall Courses 

IT Services is waiting on a file from Fairbanks that is needed to create the course shells. They expect the file any day now and then it takes several days to create the new Blackboard shells.

Faculty Engagement and Development: Effective and Innovative Practice

On April 1, 2, and 3, from 8 a.m, to 11:30 a.m., Educause Learning Initiative will host its Spring Focus Session over the web:

More than any other core mission in higher education, teaching and learning is the locus of change, innovation, and strategic re-imagining at the institutional level. As new teaching and learning options proliferate almost daily, faculty engagement and development is of fundamental importance to institutional success. Faculty development improves practice and manages change by enhancing individual strengths and abilities, as well as organizational capacities and culture. How is the teaching and learning community rethinking its approach to this task? What innovations are we seeing in faculty engagement and development, given higher education's re-examination of its teaching and learning mission? (from website)

I will attend this webinar and welcome you to join me for any part. I will be in my office, UC 132G, or a sign will be posted on the room I am using. More on the conference and the agenda. The times are all Eastern, so subtract 4 hours.

Bye, Bye Windows XP

After 12 years, support for Windows XP will end on April 8, 2014. This means no more security updates or Microsoft provided technical support for the Windows XP operating system. IT Services recommends that anyone currently using XP migrate to a modern operating system such as Windows 7 or 8.1. You will benefit from enhanced security, device choice for a mobile workforce, higher user productivity, and a lower total cost of ownership through improved management capabilities. Support for Office 2003 also ends on April 8, 2014. Contact IT Services about how to update to Office 2013. Look her for more info.

Student IT Survey- Please Spread the Word

Faculty, please encourage your undergraduate students to complete the 2014 Educause Student IT Survey by April 4. This information will be used to help assess and improve UAA's Technology services. This survey is offered through a partnership between UAA Academic Innovations & eLearning and Educause. Students have until April 4 to complete the survey and could win a Visa cash card or an iPad Mini.

Suggested Message to Students:
UAA is interested in improving undergraduate students' experiences with information technology in higher education and you have the opportunity to participate in a survey that will help us learn how to provide you with better technology services at UAA. By completing this survey you will be eligible to win one of a collection of prizes valued up to $400. Two participants from Alaska are guaranteed to win an iPad Mini. The survey link can also be found on the Blackboard login page.

CTC Ed Tech March 24, 2014

Blackboard Course Purge. Every year in the spring, IT Services deletes old Blackboard course shells. On April 18, 2014 all regular course shells from 2010 will be deleted. You can ask IT Services to not delete a course shell by contacting the  IT Call Center by April 11, 2014. This is only for regular course shells. Dev shells are never deleted.

If you want to keep a copy of your course, you can export it. This tutorial from Blackboard explains how. Include all areas you want to save - including  assignments, tests surveys and pools, and grade center if you want to have them to reuse as well. You can then import the material into another course. Please note that student work is not saved with the export.   

Archiving a course saves all the material from the shell, including student work. Though you can archive a Blackboard shell, only IT Services can restore an archive file. 

Please note that though the exported course packaged and archive files are zip files, they are not formatted to be viewable when unzipped. To view the file's contents, you have to put them back into Blackboard.

Final Exam Schedule. The final exam schedule is available now. Room assignments will be final the week of April 7.

Ed Tech as Transformative. This post by D'Arcy Norman, Why I care about Ed Tech, reflects on innovation and transformation in ed tech.  "Edtech is important not because of the tech, but because of the educational activities enabled by it." Which is foundational to me: I am less enamored of tech for the sake of tech, but instead with solving pedagogical challenges to meet learning goals. (Ok, I do like the new toys, too - but I attempt to maintain perspective.)  

CTC Ed Tech News March 18, 2014

I hope that you got what you needed out of spring break - whether it be resting, vacationing, spring cleaning, or catching up on work. Me, I worked a couple days, did home projects, and relaxed. I am ready for the rest of the semester! Here are my tidbits for this week:

Accessibility - creating PDF files. Two weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of creating accessible documents and resources for students who experience disabilities. It's important to give all our students the tools to succeed because of legal requirements. Additionally, providing accessible materials benefits all learners. One of the reasons to use Styles and other formatting techniques when creating Word files is that they create create a structure that is easy for a screen reader to navigate. The next step is to take the Word files and convert them to PDFs while maintaining the document structure. Here's a cheat sheet on creating accessible PDFs.

Flipping the Math Classroom. This is a great series of posts on flipping a calculus classroom by Robert Talbert, a mathematician and educator affiliated with the Mathematics Department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. He is thinking deeply about the pedagogy and his learning outcomes. I find his work inspiring.

• The inverted calculus course and self-regulated learning 
• The inverted calculus course: Using Guided Practice to build self-regulation
• Creating learning objectives, flipped classroom style
• Getting student buy-in for the inverted calculus class
• Getting off on the right foot in an inverted calculus class

Logging in to Blackboard as a Student. You have a special account associated with your instructor login that allows you to log in as a student to your course. You can try out a quiz, see what is available to students, or see what the student grades view looks like. 

Hint: I usually log in to Blackboard with Firefox as an instructor and log in with Chrome as a student if I am testing something. If you are just using one browser, you will have to log out as an instructor and then log in as a student. You will know that you are logged in as a student if there is no control panel. 

If your student account does not exist, or is not in a given course, contact the Call Center for help.

Here is the login information:

username: your username followed by _student

password: your ID number followed by _student

     
For example:

djones_student

30123456_student

CTC Ed Tech News March 4, 2013

It's been fun getting updates on the Iditarod. Several things impress me about the mushers who run the race; among these is their perseverance. This discussion on whether perseverance can be taught is interesting to me as an educator. It's perhaps more relevant to K-12 education, and we all have students whom we wish would just continue to work instead of giving up. How do we encourage perseverance, persistence, grit in our students? What can we build into our assignments and learning activities to encourage persistence? Let me know your thoughts. 

The Department of Justice released revised final regulations on effective communication for persons with disabilities. These regulations affect how we communicate with students and all the learning materials and learning activities we provide to them. Some proactive practices can help ease the workload if you have a student needing these accommodations. The easiest is to start creating Word and PDF files that can be read and navigated by a screen reader. In Word, this means using Styles, tables, and the column tool rather than just creating these by hand. It takes some getting used to but actually makes changing and editing a document much easier. Here's a cheat sheet for Word 2010.

If you want an example of what can happen if you don't provide timely alternative effective communication for students who experience disabilities, read this settlement between the U.S. Government and Louisiana Tech University.