All posts by Jennifer Adams

Brightspace: e-mail the whole class

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So, in my last post, I showed how users can opt in and out of notifications.  In this post we get around students being able to opt out of announcement notifications and also help keep your course site a little cleaner.

As opposed to sending an Announcement, you can email the whole class by going to “Course Admin” in the NavBar -> Learner Management section and click on “Classlist”.

Then select from the top “Email Classlist”

Click on “Send Email”

and compose your email to the whole class here.  Click “Send”.

originally published: https://wp.me/p4md28-nx

Brightspace Notifications

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How to setup your alerts  and register your mobile device on Brightspace:

Find Notifications under the location where it says your name.

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Under Contact Methods:

Register your Mobile Device

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Set your SMS and eMail notifications:

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When you have everything setup, click Save at the bottom left corner of the page.

Remember to check your email inside of Brightspace.  You can see that by clicking on the icon that looks like an envelope.

originally published: https://wp.me/p4md28-nn

Brightspace e-mail

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Brightspace has its own email and it can push notifications out to our stonybrook.edu e-mail.

It is important that students, faculty and staff understand that using the inbox inside of Brightspace is important.

It is found by clicking on the envelope icon.

 

originally published: https://wp.me/p4md28-nj

Workshops!

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Have you been  to any of our workshops?

With subjects including:

Not only do these workshops focus on subjects that students want to learn about, but they are also offered at the times we have found to be most popular for students, including weekends and evenings!

Sign up for upcoming workshops using SBEngage today!

All Those Test Options in Blackboard & How to Give a Synchronous Test*

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This blog entry is going to focus on the options in Blackboard that have to do with the timing of an test.

When you are first creating the Test.. these options are found under the Test Information area and span a few sections.  If you have already made the test you can find these options by clicking the chevron next to the test name and clicking “Edit the Test Options”.

Force Completion


When you set this option, if the student looses the connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be unable to go back and finish the test. (Without you having to intervene anyway.)  We don’t recommend enabling this setting.

Set Timer

This option gives the student a visible countdown timer during the test. It begins after the test description and instructions have been displayed. If Auto-Submit  is selected, at the end of the count down, it ends the test, no matter where they were.  If Auto-Submit is not checked, you will see an exclamation point in the grade center and have the option to adjust the grade, if they went long.

If the Force Completion is not set, and a student looses their connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be able to continue taking the test, and the timer will continue from when it initially started. (eg., If they loose the connection for 10 minutes, they loose that 10 minutes.)

Display After and Until

A better way of handling whether students can see the test, rather than the “Make the Link Available” option.  Also consider, they can’t start what they cannot see.  *So if you want everyone to be done by 1pm and you have a 30 minute timer with auto-submit enabled, consider Display Until to end around 12:30. 

Due Date

Due dates (and times) do not affect the test availability (unless you choose the Do not allow students to start the Test if the due date has passed option), but rather provide a flag on the test if it was started or ended after the due date/time.

Test Availability Exceptions

This section allows you to make test rule exceptions for people that need accommodations, or have other needs depending on language or technology situations.

If these settings exist for a test or survey, you can create these exceptions:

  • Number of attempts
  • Timer
  • Availability: Date and time the test is available to the student or group
  • Force completion
  • Restrict location

 

Have any interesting testing stories to tell?  What other testing options do you have questions about?  Please comment below!

New Live Streaming Attendance Feature

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This new feature is available for those instructors who have live streaming turned on inside of Echo360.  It will show, as seen below, who is logged into the live stream, as well as log this information (and the total connection time) for your use in calculating attendance.

If this feature makes a difference in your decision on whether you want to turn on live streaming, please contact us at tlt_its@stonybrook.edu to make any changes to your capture schedule.

Attendance Verification Tools and Suggestions

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All faculty should have recently received an email regarding attendance verification from the Office of the Registrar.  This is the webpage that relates to the same topic: https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/registrar/policies/tracking.php

The part of this that we can assist with is related to this quote:

“Financial Aid eligibility is determined based on a student’s attendance or participation in an academically related activity in the class.”

In other words, simply taking attendance isn’t good enough.  There must also be proof of academically related activities.  They have some examples of methods for meeting this requirement on their site.

You may already use Clickers in the classroom.  In CELT we always offer the guidance of their use to facilitate learning and engagement in the classroom. Even the largest lecture halls at SBU can be interactive and stimulating when these student engagement tools are used to their fullest.

So… good examples of questions to ask for the purposes of taking attendance and demonstrating academic content, will be:

pre-assessment questions (what do they think they understand or know before you teach the subject)

mid-lesson assessment (are they understanding the concepts you are currently explaining)

homework spot checks (a question about something only covered in previously assigned homework)

post-assessment questions (what did they learn during class… particularly useful when compared to pre-assessment results.)

Questions that explore cultural diversity or opinions (usually anonymous with no right or wrong answers and clearly appropriate to your subject matter.)

Also, they can be successfully used to facilitate and report back group work such as Think/Pair/Share and Jigsaw activities.

These would be poor examples of clicker use and would not demonstrate academically related activities :

Are you here today?
Did you do your homework?
Click in for attendance now.

Other tools that Academic Technologies and CELT offer that can demonstrate both academically related activities and attendance include Blackboard, echo360, VoiceThread, Qualtrics, Google Apps and Adobe Connect.

Please feel free to setup an appointment or attend one of our workshops, to find out more.

ASR for Live Presentations in Google Slides & MS PowerPoint

Lecture Capturing

This is super easy.   But a caveat… we have a BIG feature request for Google and MS regarding this technology.

So here is a recording I made using QuickTime Player on a Mac, of myself giving a test presentation in Google Slides.  You will notice that there is no audio.  I think that I don’t have the audio setup right for QT, but in a way it illustrates the power of this ASR.  Technical problems happen while we are teaching.  It does happen.  In this case, because I was using ASR in Google Slides, you can still receive my presentation through sight.

Hover over the video and click on the icon with the box and arrow, to make the video larger, so you can read the live captions.

Next I try the same basic idea in MS Power Point.  It is slightly more complicated to activate, but still not an overwhelming obstacle.  I also fixed my QuickTime Player audio for this recording. MS uses their own “intelligent services” for the captioning, whereas Google used the Macs built in speech recognition.

 

Now for the Caveat.  When you are finished, the captions aren’t saved.  If I hadn’t done screen recordings, I wouldn’t even have this much.  So you can’t use them for individuals who would have been employing a screen reader, and you can’t use this to jump start your production of a transcript.  This is only for producing captions during a live talk and only useful for sighted individuals.

If you are interested in using ASR for successfully making your course recordings accessible and even fully ADA compliant, please look into turning on ASR within echo360.org by using this form.

This is a cross post from you.stonybrook.edu/jadams