IT Weekly Update

Greetings SBU IT blog readers! I wanted to take a few moments to jot down what's been going on in the three main areas for Instructional Technology. The ITV front has been fairly quiet for June, but Graduate Education classes will kickoff in full force on June 30th, so the coming week will involve making sure all is ready for that. Electronic Classrooms (EC) have also been fairly quiet so far. I did install a hinging mount for a computer monitor for Jester 230, in hopes it will help with visibility issues for student seating areas. I did get two new document cameras for use in Taylor 220 and Music 107, and while I have intentions of getting them installed in the Jun 23rd week, I may be short on time and gumption with efforts in other areas. The area getting much of my focus is LMS, both Blackboard and ANGEL. Content from former Bb Organizations has been copied into the new course-orgs, and there is some tweaking work still needed for the login and My Courses module areas, since those were affected by the license downgrade.

I've completed the first week of ANGEL Instructor Training, and I keep finding more and more reasons to like ANGEL. ITS members have had three meetings with ANGEL support folks, all of them helping us get to the point of planning for our own testing server to be running by Friday the 27th of June. This will assist with the Administrator training and efforts, allowing us to kick the tires and get the system to work with the rest of SBU's resources. Having access to the Support documentation, I have found two files that would be of interest to SBU faculty, even this much before you have access to SBU's ANGEL yourselves. Both the Blackboard Switcher, and the Instructional Design files, can give you some insights on what is the same and also different between Bb and ANGEL. If you would like to have access to these files, please e-mail me at ncross AT sbuniv DOT sbu. Or leave a comment on this blog post! B^)