Monthly Archives: September 2017

Missing Clicker Grade? Check this:

I have written about this before, but the clicker looks different, so I thought it was worth going over again.

There are two different ways that a student can use a clicker to send information to the instructor.  The first is the normal use of the clicker in the classroom… the poll response.  When a student uses this, the screen looks like this,

And when the student answers, they get a confirmation that the answer was received, and as long as the poll was given some grade, they may also get points in their blackboard grade book.

The second thing that students can send with their clickers are Messages.  The student enters into this mode by pressing the wrench button on the clicker,

and then sending the message

The student also gets a happy confirmation that this has been sent.. and messages can only be sent when the polls are open. But there are no grades or points associated with this activity, and if they believe they have answered a poll, they will get a zero.

As the instructor, you can check to see if this is happening in your class by opening the TurningPoint 8 software, go to the Manage tab, select a session file and click on Reports.

If you, like me get this error – ignore it

just click ok

and use the pulldown to select the report type Session Log

 

If you see entries that look like:

“Doe, John (8D5678) sent a message to the presenter: D”

You have students that think they are answering polls, but are really sending messages.  If you see things like:

“Doe, John (8D5678) sent a message to the presenter: Can you talk more about Mitosis?”

You have students who are sending messages, thinking you will see them and respond.

If you would like to see messages during class – you can.

You can click on the button as seen above that looks like a comic dialog bubble..  and that brings up a chat area that looks like this:

I hope this helps, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to either TLT @ tlt@stonybrook.edu or Turning Technologies at support@turningtechnologies.com

 

Looking to buy a clicker or clicker license?

You have two official paths to choose from.

The campus store where clickers and licenses are now available at Shop Red West in the Melville library, Shop Red East in Level 2, Room 310 of Health Sciences and Seawolves MarketPlace at the Student Activities Center (SAC). Which has these prices:

Clicker w/ 1-year subscription –> $76.00
Clicker w/ 5-year subscription –> $108.00
1-Year Subscription ONLY –> $39.98
5-Year Subscription ONLY –> $74.98

The nice thing about this option is that you walk out with a clicker or license and don’t have to worry about waiting for it to arrive in the mail.

Or you can get them directly from Turning Technologies.  You can get to the SBU Turning Technologies store by going into your account (inside Blackboard, in your course , then  Tools -> Turning Account Registration and then click through till you see something that says purchase subscription or purchase clicker. These are the current prices:

Clicker w/ 1-year subscription –> $53.98
Clicker w/ 5-year subscription –> $77.98
1-term Subscription ONLY–> $17.99
1-Year Subscription ONLY –> $24.99
5-Year Subscription ONLY –> $48.99
Clicker ONLY –> $32.99
If you get a clicker, you have a minimum shipping (from my test) of $7.80 and licenses get directly applied to your account (so no risk of typos) and incur no shipping charges.

 

 

Organizing your course files in echo360

echo360 has added so many features to its cloud based platform, that it starts to resemble a light learning management system (LMS).  Today, I want to show you how to organize your files inside of echo360.

The original usage for echo360 at SBU was for classroom based capture.  Essentially we would schedule room recordings that would grab the video from a camera in the room, the video as was projected on the screen by the instructor in the room, and the audio from the room.  This would typically produce a list of videos, that grew as the semester went on.  Not a lot to organize there.

Now however, every user gets a library in the cloud.  This is where your learning documents will go, in addition to any room based captures you may have.  It takes the following files:

Mainly, videos, pdfs, audio, and power points.

To get content there, select UPLOAD CONTENT

It allows you to grab these files from a few different locations… or just drag and drop them.

If you have selected a file it likes, it will process the file and eventually it will be listed and happy in your Library.

Assuming you now want to have them show up for your students, keep following along here.

Next you will click on the file in your Library and you will see the file in the top part of the window and three sections in the lower part, labeled INFO, PUBLISHING and SHARING.

Click on PUBLISHING and then the blue button “PUBLISH”

Select To a course – Use the pull down menu to pick a course and the second pull down to select the section

and when you select New Class  the ability to name the file comes up as seen below

BREAK — terminology alert!  in echo360 speak, a “class” is sorta the same as a lesson – or in this case, stand alone document.  The existing class option, will bind the file to an existing recording for a particular day.  Likewise, “Class name” should just be a descriptive name of the file.

ok.  Now that the file has been published to the correct course, we can organize this further for your students (and possibly your own personal sanity.)

Here is what my list of files looks like in the test course.  It’s fine, there aren’t a lot of them, so it isn’t very messy.

Oh – wait, here is another terminology alert! NEW GROUP… equals “New Folder”.   It comes with a functionality alert… if you delete a folder filled with stuff…. the stuff just gets unsorted and shows up in the main list again.

So I will pretend I want to make a Lesson 1 folder and a PDFs folder.  I click on NEW GROUP

name the file… write a description if I want, and click OK. I’m doing this twice for the two new folders. Now my list includes those two new folders.

To put my files into those folders, I first click on REORDER

That puts blue dashed lines around all the items and they can be dragged around.

I’ve dragged them into the folders and now I have to click SAVE

This slightly terrifying warning pops up

 

Click OK

and now everything is neat and organized.