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Seats Still Available for Summer Tech Camp

There are still a few seats available for our annual Summer Tech Camp, August 1-4, 2011, 9am-3pm each day in room LL-109 on the ground floor of the San Marcos campus library.

If you want to build your teaching-with-technology skill set, meet and get to know new colleagues, participate in a fun, directed educational event, receive 24 hours of PD credit, receive valuable technology hardware gifts, have an opportunity to win great tech prizes, and do it all with a free continental breakfast and catered lunch, please join us.

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at summer Tech Camp

Email pdoffice@palomar.edu your intention to attend to reserve your spot. See you at Tech Camp.

Downloadable Tech Camp Announcement

The last Blackboard with Cream & Sugar session will be held May 25, 2011 (there will also be one on May 18). Yes, we know this is after the semester ends. The idea is to provide an opportunity for faculty members wishing to close out their semester in Blackboard to confer casually with the Blackboard technicians, who will be available in room LL-111 from 7:30AM to 10:30AM on those dates. You may have grade center questions or need advice on how to archive your completed courses. You may also want advice on how to import an old course from the former Blackboard 8 system in preparation for teaching it in the fall, or simply want to chat with our techs or demonstrate something that really worked well for you this semester. We are eager to help and will have hot coffee and tea for you if you want to drop by.

Blackboard Upgrade Scheduled for June 2-3

Blackboard will be down for maintenance on June 2-3. There are few opportunities to upgrade the system throughout the year, and this is one of them. We try to apply the latest service packs, containing both new features and bug fixes, before the beginning of each semester. After the upgrade, we will be current with Blackboard version 9.1 Service Pack 5. A new feature available for summer semester will be McGraw-Hill Connect. An important bug fix will be repair to the item copy feature. If you are new to Blackboard, see our Teaching with Blackboard page for quick tutorials and valuable information.

The window of opportunity to upgrade before the fall semester is tentatively set for August 16-17. This is cutting it close, because part-time plenary is scheduled for the 18th, but it is the only possible time. Service pack 6 should be available for upgrade then. Typically in the couple of weeks before fall semester faculty members are busily preparing their Blackboard courses, so make a note of these dates. Get an early start so that you will not be disappointed when Blackboard is down for maintenance.

During the June 2-3 upgrade we will also be upgrading our Help Ticketing system, adding live chat and a host of other new features.

Thank You For Taking Our Blackboard and Computer Lab Satisfaction Surveys

For those of you who have made a Blackboard course available this semester, we appreciate your participation in our Blackboard satisfaction survey. Preliminary results are reported in our Blackboard for Faculty blog post today. More results will be forthcoming at the same source. We had a remarkable survey return rate (50%) and want to send out a very big THANK YOU.

We were gratified that results were generally very favorable. You provided valuable suggestions that we will be forwarding to Blackboard, Inc. Notable results were that 68.9% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that "Blackboard has improved the communication I am able to achieve with my students." Also, 66.2% agreed or strongly agreed that "Using Blackboard has created new teaching opportunities for me and new learning opportunities for my students."

At the same time we want to thank the many students who participated in the Academic Technology computer lab survey. Perhaps the most gratifying result of that survey was that in response to the question: "Rate how helpful the computer lab has been in helping you achieve your educational goals." Here are the results:

We are putting the finishing touches on our WordPress installation that should be available for faculty, staff and student participation in the fall. We will be testing it over the summer. Watch this newsletters to find out when you can have your own Palomar domain WordPress blog or WordPress template web site.