April 12, 2007 Contents Technology News Briefs Training Opportunities Next Week Blackboard Feature of the Week: "Blackboard 7.2 Upgrade" For more, visit our podcast notes page for Episode 58.

Blackboard Upgrade   The Blackboard system will be unavailable on Saturday, April 21.  It will be down for an upgrade to version 7.2.  For information email atrc@palomar.edu or call (760) 744-1150 ext. 2862.

Technology & Download News Briefs

• There will not be a podcast next week.  We will resume podcasting on April 27.
   
• The Blackboard system will be unavailable Saturday, April 21 from 12:01am to approximately 5pm in order to update to version 7.2 of Blackboard.  See the "Blackboard Feature of the Week" below for an explanation of the nature of the upgrade.  The upgrade should have only very minor feature set impact, but does fix several bugs that have been reported by users of Blackboard at Palomar.  Blackboard, Inc. recommends we make the upgrade as soon as possible.  For these reasons, we have decided to proceed with the Blackboard before the end of the semester, which is when we would normally perform system upgrades.
   
• On Friday, April 20 Fulbright Scholar Cory Doctorow will be discussing his latest book, Set Top Cop: Hollywood's Secret War on Your Living Room a nonfiction book about the interaction of technology control systems, democracy, culture and competition and free speech.
  
  Mr. Doctorow is an award winning science-fiction writer, Mr. copyright reform activist, blogger, public speaker and technology person.
  
  He recently released his second short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present from Thunder’s Mouth Press.
  
  His science-fiction novels include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
  
  Doctorow is an advocate of freely sharing information and as a result makes much of his work available free online as Creative Commons-licensed downloads. He's also the co-editor of Boing Boing, an online "directory of wonderful things." For four years, he served as the director of European affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which he describes as "a technology advocacy nonprofit that works to uphold liberty in technology law, policy and standards." To learn more about Cory to to http://www.craphound.com
  
  Cory will speak in room P-32 from 9-11am.  Admission is free.  Seating is limited to RSVP to Patrick O'Brien at (760) 744-1150 ext. 2577 or pobrien@palomar.edu.

Training Opportunities

• Academic Technology Training

• On Friday, April 20 from 1-3pm in room LL-109 David Gray will present "Creating Assessments in Blackboard."
• On Tuesday, April 24, from 2-4pm, Chris Norcross is present "So Long FrontPage: The Future of Web Authoring at Palomar College," where Chris will introduce the curious and committed to SharePoint Designer 2007.
• On Wednesday, April 25, from 10-11am in room LL-111, Haydn Davis will present "Engaging the Online Learner."
• On Thursday, April 26, from 1-3pm, Terry Gray will present "Using RSS, Blogs and Podcasts to Communicate."  The workshop will be held in room LL-111.

• @ONE training resources:
  • Multi-week, instructor facilitated online classes.
  • Lunch'N'Learn 1-hour webinars.
  • Self-paced courses.
     
• Free training from Microsoft:
   
  • Free Microsoft eLearning courses: for a limited time access to these excellent e-Learning products on Office 2007 is available.  Click here to access a gateway to sign-up for training in the new Office interface, Access 2007, Excel 2007, Infopath 2007, OneNote 2007, Outlook 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Word 2007, Visio 2007, and Groove 2007.  You may also download a free e-book from this site titled First Look 2007 Microsoft Office System in PDF format.
     
• Free online training is available for Horizon Wimba:
  • Other Training in:
    • Live Classroom
    • Voice Tools
    • Pronto

The Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray

The Upgrade to Blackboard 7.2

All in all, the changes which will come from the upgrade to Blackboard 7.2 should be negligible to the average user. There are several new or improved features, but unless used these features will not impact the course material at all. There are also several fixes for issues seen here at Palomar which we are anxious to see applied to the system, as well as performance increases into grading and statistics subsystems. So the changes should seem minor to users, but should improve the overall experience of using Blackboard. Specific noteworthy changes are listed below.

There are a number of enhancements to current Blackboard tools:

• Announcements – An extra checkbox now appears on the Add Announcement page, which will send an email to all course users about the new announcement. This vastly simplifies a Best Practice of posting an announcement whenever an email goes out to all students.
   
• Email – Although the Email tool still does not allow use of the Visual Text Box Editor, now emails sent from within Blackboard can contain HTML. If an email is sent in conjunction with a posted Announcement (as above) the limited Visual Text Box Editor of the Announcement tool can be used to format the email text.
   
• Gradebook - Instructors can now add and store optional notes or explanations with each grade that is visible to students. A “Modify Comments” button is available when an instructor edits a grade, and a corresponding “View Comments” button displays in the student My Grades list if a comment has been provided.
   
• Discussion Board – Several enhancements to the Discussion Board screens have been added, including the ability to search for posts on a specific date range without having other text to search for. Also the Thread Detail page may be switched from the top or bottom of the page for easier navigation of threads.
   
• Discussion Board Grading – Grades based on the Discussion Board are now included in gradebook calculations by default. Also, when students drop from the course they will no longer show up in the Discussion Board grading interface.
   
• Performance Improvements – The Discussion Board forum lists and Performance Dashboard information should load much faster in all courses.

The Early Warning System tool is added into course Control Panels. This tool, although originally designed for K-12 institutions, may be of use in identifying trends (both positive and negative) in student performance. Similar to grade-based Adaptive Release, Early Warning rules are established which will allow instructors to receive lists of students meeting the rule criteria, with tools to easily email students listed for any desired follow-up contact.

New OS and Browser combinations may also be used with this new Blackboard version, including Windows Vista with either IE 7 or Firefox 2. Firefox 2 is also supported on both Windows XP and OS X 10.4.

In addition to these new abilities, this version increase of Blackboard will fix several reported known issues, such as:

• Posting graded Discussion Boards on a copied course causes the Discussion Board grades to disappear from the gradebook in the source course.
   
• When a Course Copy is processed, all content is placed into a single content area, instead of properly distributed across multiple content areas.
   
• When a Course Link is added to an Announcement, the link appears at first, but vanishes after a user clicks on the link.

There are other fixes included, but these three items have actually been seen on Palomar’s Blackboard system.

	Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 10:50]
	See the index of Dave's previous "Blackboard Feature of the Week" segments.

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