#auc09 The fun and power of using Macros in ANGEL for Web 2.0 content to embed in courses and share with others is Very Impressive. Looking forward to sharing.

Day One at #auc09 is Done

Just wanted to give a report on the topics covered as the SBU team spread out to cover the topics of interest. From the Plenary, Ray Henderson's report card and demo on version 7.4 was worth enduring the rest for. Google content, rubric enhancements, Institutional Directory, and some really nice additions for the Gradebook, were all very impressive and exciting.

For the sessions that covered the rest of the day, we found out details about such things as:

• Evergreen Training
• Upgrading to 7.4 details
• Integrating Google Docs
• iTunesU and ANGEL integration
• A Second Life dropbox which is integrated into ANGEL
• How to provide student identification verification
• Promoting Higher Quality Online Discussion and Interaction
• Use of Rubrics in version 7.4

Tomorrow's sessions will carry us into mid-afternoon, and then the journey home.

In a hands-on session at #auc09 about Second Life. Looking forward to hearing about the ANGEL Learning dropbox for Second Life, a great aide to use for class!

Very excited by the ANGEL 7.4 report and demonstration. As great as 7.3 is, these latest features are Fantastic! Looking forward to install and use of 7.4!

We've Arrived at ANGEL User Conference 2009

And by we, I mean Peggy Walden, Scott McNeal, and myself.  The trip went very smoothly, Chicago downtown traffic was a bit brutal, but Google Maps led us right to the hotel entrance.  After settling into our rooms, we gathered our conference materials, attended the welcoming reception, then met to make plans for Thursday morning and settle on the sessions we are going to attend.

For more information on the conference, please visit:

http://www.angellearning.com/auc/ 

And to follow the chatter about AUC09 on Twitter, try:

http://twitter.com/nealcross 

or

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23auc09 

I plan to blog at least at the end of each day, and might even try some blog posts via SMS from my phone.  Now, time to check on e-mails and such!

Some ANGEL first steps

OK, it's May 2009, and your Summer and/or Fall 2009 courses are now on:

http://angel.sbuniv.edu

Instead of Blackboard. You login, but you are not seeing any courses? You just need to change the settings on your Courses Nugget:

1. Hold your mouse cursor over the Courses nugget, then click the pencil icon that appears in the colored bar with the word "Courses" in it.
2. Change the "Show Disabled" setting from No to Yes.
3. Checking the other options helps keep your courses organized by Semesters and Categories.
4. Click the Save button, and now your Courses nugget shows all those courses.

If you are using your course, and you are now ready to let your students see the course, you'll need to change the status from Disabled to Enabled:

1. Go into the course, and then the Manage tab (far right across the top).
2. In the Course Settings nugget, click the General Course Settings link.
3. Click the Access tab, then change the "Member Access" setting from "Editors Only" to "All Members".
4. Click Save.

Now, if you go back to the ANGEL Home, you'll see in the Courses nugget that the course is no longer Disabled.

If you have any questions or comments about ANGEL at SBU, please send an e-mail to:

angel AT sbuniv DOT edu

TLT Conference and other foods for thoughts

Two weeks from now, I'll be travelling to attend Purdue's Teaching and Learning with Technology conference.  Not only do all the presentation topics sound great, but the first morning keynote is by Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins.  I was fortunate to meet her in Second Life (two years ago, at least?), and have viewed a few of her presentations virtually since then.  The slides from a March 2009 symposium presentation she gave is certainly some good food for thought:

The Seven Deadly Sins Of Technology In Higher

View more presentations from Sarah Robbins.

I plan to use some manner of blog and Twitter combination to cover the journey and conference, which happens to (of course) embrace the use of tools like Ning and Twitter:

Twitter:
Follow @TLTConference on http://twitter.com/. Be sure to use the hashtag #tlt09, can look for the hashtag via http://search.twitter.com.

Ning:
Join the conference social network http://tltconference.ning.com.

A blurb about Twitter

I've been using Twitter.com for almost a year now, and have more than once thought that watching the Tweets from those I follow is like getting a peek into what humanity is thinking about at anyone time.

My Tweet

And I recently viewed this Rocketboom.com video, "The Twitter Global Mind" that does a nice job of exploring and explaining that idea:



Not using Twitter.com yourself yet? Might want to consider it.

More Sir Ken Robinson

Thanks to one of the many folks I follow on Twitter.com, earlier today I was able to listen live to most of an interview with Sir Ken Robinson, whom I've posted about before on his Ted talk. The program link is here:

KUOW 94.9 Public Radio

And here is the recorded Podcast file

Another January 2009 Faculty Workshop Presentation

Ed Walton gave a presentation about Library Tips and Tricks, and afterwards asked for me to share it via my blog. So, I've used this as an opportunity to use two different methods; Slideshare.net and Google Docs.

Library Tips & Tricks - Faculty Workshop Spring 2009

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: resources library)

January 2009 Faculty Workshops

I am presenting two topics during the workshops:

Instructional Design with ANGEL = a look at the pedagogical why and how for what you can do with your ANGEL course, for supporting your face to face class, or a hybrid class, or even a fully online.

http://prezi.com/4627/

Reports and Automation in ANGEL = Wish you had a graduate assistant for your classes? Wanting to save your self some time and effort? Wish you could provide a more interactive course? We'll take a look at how you can check on things in your class with Reports, and how that same information can work for you by making Agents do the work automatically.

http://prezi.com/4643/

And these are my second and third Prezi.com presentations.

And now for something, completely different

To say that TED talks are a great way to have a guest speaker for your class might be an understatement. Having watched a few clips from the TED site earlier, I'd like to share this one on the topic of how schools kill creativity:



You can always find great food for thought at http://www.ted.com

(updated the embeded video code 1/1/2009)

SBU ANGEL News

Well, it has been way too long since the last blog post here. I want to get back in the habit of getting information about SBU Instructional Technology out to you, the reader. And a recent bit of publicity seems to be a good way to get the ball rolling again.

ANGEL has been kind enough to work with us on the following press release:

http://www.angellearning.com/media/news/2008-11-19.html

Our thanks to Nancy Schmutzler, Sr. Marketing Communications Specialist, for her time and efforts.

Stay tuned for more news about ANGEL, and other areas of Instructional Technology at SBU!

Another Summer 2008 IT Update

Time to give SBU another blog post on how things are going for Instructional Technology this summer. Picking up from the last post, and going week by week...

During the week of July 7th, quite of bit of Electronic Classroom install work was done. The Blackboard login page was updated to provide some details and links to more information. ANGEL released their ePortfolio version 2.1, which we've added to our testing server. This week saw the end of ITV classes which ran from 7am to 6pm, and the first day of sales for the new iPhone 3G were on the 11th, which made for some interesting Twitter reading. People standing in line for hours, authorizing systems overwhelming, etc.

The week of July 14th started with the availability of the new Palm Treo 800w; while it starts with Sprint only, it will most likely be available on Alltel soon after. Now that Bolivar has the faster EV data service, my older Palm Treo 700wx feels even more useful than before, and the built-in features like GPS and Wi-Fi for the 800w would be a nice step up. Beyond dreams of a newer cell phone, this week had three days of Datatel training in the ITS computer lab, continued Electronic Classroom install work, and another ANGEL meeting. We started talking about Configuration details for our ANGEL server, and the abilities and features highlighted in those discussions were exciting and well-received. Another two week set of ITV classes started this week, but they are both start time of 1pm, so the workload is much lighter than the previous two weeks.

To close, how about a peek into the week of July 21st? We've just had the last of the full new Electronic Classroom installs for the Bolivar campus completed today. I'll still need to revisit them all for fine tuning and such well before August 25th. Work on the Salem campus is scheduled to begin on Wednesday this week. The last week of Summer 2008 ITV is underway, and another ANGEL meeting is scheduled for Thursday. At this meeting, we'll start applying the ideas discussed last week to our testing server.

The Summer semester has gone past very quickly, it will be Fall 2008 before I know it!

On the eve of the 4th of July 2008

I ran out of time and gumption to make a post last week, so I wanted to review the past two weeks in SBU Instructional Technology before enjoying a three day weekend.

On the LMS front, we have a testing ANGEL server running now, which has been of great use for the Administrator training. I just keep finding more and more reasons to like ANGEL, from both the Instructor and Administrator perspectives. For Blackboard, I did receive confirmation from the vendor for our previous My Courses module (with the red push pins and courses organized by semester) that it will not work on our downgraded server. So, I will soon need to make a post here dedicated to working with the original My Courses module. Basically, you can modify the list of courses it will show, that way you are not looking at courses from Fall 2005 if you don't want to.

Summer ITV started June 30th, and with a class that starts a 7am, and another that ends at 5:45pm, I've had rather long days in the office. Working towards a three day weekend has helped, and the classes themselves have all run very smoothly. It can be kinda quiet here without some students going in and out from ITV classes. And I always enjoy seeing communication technology making it possible to deliver face-to-face learning in a convenient-for-many way.

And today marked the first major installs for new Electronic Classrooms this summer. Jester Learning and Performance Center's 244 room now has all the equipment it needs. There are some minor issues to resolve, otherwise the room is nearly done. The list I have made to keep track of all the efforts is fairly long, such that I have to scroll up and down a fair amount in OneNote to see it all. But getting this room, and the projector mounted in the Art Department's computer lab, serves as a great way to start checking items off the list.

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^)

Blackboard and ANGEL status updates

Blackboard was downgraded successfully earlier this week. My thanks to David Bolton for his efforts to get the former organizations ("orgs") working as courses. I have been able to upload the content for most orgs starting with A-L, and the SBU Staff Council, with little problem. I would be further along, but I am taking the time to cleanup the extra clutter made by the Import process in each org's menu. All the course orgs start with an X in the course ID. I'll try to finish up the rest of the org content loading early in the June 16th week. Once that is done, please feel free to look around, make your org Available, etc. And if you find any problems, or have any questions, please e-mail via blackboard@sbuniv.edu

The noon hour on Friday the 13th was SBU ITS's first meeting with ANGEL via phone conference, with the goal of getting started on the implementation process. So far, things look good for beginning the online training very soon, and getting our test server up and running. This will initially be use for both Administrator training, as well as figuring out how to make things work as we want and need.

We've started down the road that leads from Blackboard to ANGEL.

New furniture for Electronic Classrooms

Benees 001
Originally uploaded by npcross

Much like my June 4 2008 post about Electronic Classrooms (ECs), this one about ECs has two purposes. One, to show the new Benees (www.benees.com) furniture we recently received to use for this summer's install work. Second, I am trying out Flickr a bit more, by adding notes to this and the Benees 002 photo, and then making a blog post from the Benees 001 photo from Flickr into the SBU IT blog. We've started to receive some of the new slimeline case computers needed to make the smaller furniture work. Since these two are destined for Springfield, moving and unloading/reloading equipment will be part of the process. SBU IT has used Benees furniture for several years now, and continues to be pleased with the product and price.

Blackboard Downgrade Scheduled

Instructional Technology (IT) has the needed information from Blackboard Support, and therefore has scheduled our Blackboard server downgrade to occur late night on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008. A two hour maintenance window from 11pm on the 11th to 1am on the 12th will be used. IT asks you make your final preparations to copy files and portfolios from Blackboard between now and 6/11/08 11pm. Instructions for doing so were posted earlier on this same blog.

Then, on the 12th, we will recover former organizations to their new courses on Blackboard. Summer 2008 courses should not be affected by this downgrade. Please e-mail any questions, comments or concerns to: blackboard@sbuniv.edu

Electronic Classroom Plans for Summer 2008

I have two purposes in this post. One, I want to inform the readers of a general sense on what IT is doing with Electronic Classrooms this summer. Second, I have been wanting to try the ability to embed a Google Docs presentation into a website. So, please view the following slides to know what new rooms are being installed, and what rooms will have some manner of update or enhancement done.