This morning an email was sent to all Fall 2022 West Campus, HSC and Southampton Instructors. To view it online , click here
Category Archives: Academic Technologies
3rd Party Tools being added to Brightspace
Thank you to all who have reached out asking about 3rd party tools
The following list will be updated as more tools become available in the system.
Tools that are working:
- Echo360
- Lumen
- McGraw Hill Connect
- Respondus
- Turn It In (this is the replacement for SafeAssign in Blackboard)
- VoiceThread
- Wiley
- Zoom
Tools that are still being configured:
- Ally
- Cengage
- Digital Desk
- Jones & Bartlett Learning
- Macmillan Learning
- MindLinks
- MyLab & Mastering
- Vital Source
- W.W. Norton & Company
KB articles for tools that are in production are available on the Brightspace service page : https://brightspace.stonybrook.edu
Brightspace has arrived!
This blog has been “quiet” for some time but now, thanks to Brightspace & the return to campus, it seems the perfect time to re-ignite it!
In case you haven’t heard .. Brightspace has arrived!
Later this week, I will post a video highlighting some of my favorite tools that I tried this Spring, which include: Quick Eval, Course Progress, Checklists and Intelligent Agents.
Once you add the pieces (that you already have from your Blackboard course) :
The built in tools mentioned above will work for you with minimal effort on your part.
To see what I’m talking about, view Brightspace – Start with the _pieces .. Video coming soon!
Stay tuned….
Diana Voss
Director of Academic Technology Services
ASR for Live Presentations in Google Slides & MS PowerPoint
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
Using ECHO 360 to record lectures?
If you are using ECHO 360 this semester to record your lectures and would like to capture student questions, please make sure you borrow a Microphone from AV Services. When answering a student’s question in class from the lectern, please repeat the question before answering so the question is captured on the ECHO.