If you pay for ChatGPT, you now have access to Sora, their video creation AI application. This is my first attempt… It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s super goat!
Prompt: a herd of mountain goats can be seen charging up the side of a rocky hill. One of the ones in the front is carrying a ran banner. it is very dramatic and the camera zooms in as they get to the top of the hill.
If you are looking to work on your grades offline in excel, and you know you will want to create new columns that you want your students to see, create the columns first in Brightspace, and then export the file as a CSV. Even though there is language in the process that suggests you can create columns offline, I do not suggest trying to do this.
To create a new column, go to Manage Grades -> New -Item.
If this column only needs to be seen by students, and will not interact with anything else in brightspace, I suggest choosing the Text option for the item type.
Text columns are only visible to students if you have the setting “grade scheme symbol” checked in Grades -> Settings -> Org Unit Display Options -> Student View Display Options.
Conversely, if you don’t have this box checked, I guess you can use this column type to make notes about each student that you don’t want them to see? Like name pronunciations or pronoun notes.
Without even bothering to explore Adobe Express much, I just assumed it was a dumbed down version of Adobe Photoshop. It does satisfy that description, but it is also a dumbed down Premier, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, converter, AND text to graphic AI generator.
menu of quick actions
part two of quick action items in adobe express
QR Code maker:
Generative AI image style:
What is a seawolf?
Maybe make it look more like a university mascot?
or start with a real photo and just mess with that using AI
That one “Animate from Audio” I’ve blogged about before: https://you.stonybrook.edu/jadams/2024/06/12/adobe-education-institute-animate-from-audio-in-adobe-express/
Here is that Collage Tool:
Yet another toy to place with. Educate yourself about it as well. The Speech to Speech option can be used to do a deepfake, but for the voice.
https://elevenlabs.io/
image of voice generator from website
As with the February Brightspace release, the March 2024 release is also on the smaller side, however, I did want to highlight 2 of the items in the update here. This release is scheduled to be deployed on the evening of March 14th, 2024. The full release notes can be found here: https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/25427-march-2024-20-24-3
The two features highlighted in this email do not require any updates to permissions or enabling of variables.
Brightspace Editor – Consistent link creation with the ability to choose link format:
Inserting a link into the Brightspace Editor opens the Add Link dialog, allowing users to determine if their links open in a new window (default) or in the current window, as well as to add text to their link. This provides users with a consistent workflow and control over how links respond in their content.
Add Link opens when inserting links with the context menu or with the keyboard shortcut ctrl+K or command+K:
Additionally, the dialog includes a new Insert Quicklink option, allowing for users to insert a Quicklink:
[Note: a quicklink is a link to another location in your course and it will not break if you copy it forward to other courses.]
The same Link, Text, and Open In options are displayed whether adding a Link or Quicklink, which helps ensure a consistent link creation workflow:
Finally – this feature updates the icons shown in the Insert Quicklink menu so that they all have the same visual style.
In summary, previously, adding links had different field options and behaviors based on how the link was being added to the course. This updates makes the adding link menus consistent across all areas where this can be done.
I encourage you to read the full release notes for this specific update, located here: https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/25427-march-2024-20-24-3#brightspace-editor-consistent-link-creation-with-the-ability-to-choose-link-format-updated
Quizzes – Improved experience for generating quiz reports:
This release introduces a better experience for instructors when running and exporting quiz reports with large amounts of data:
3. After selecting the desired tab, click either Export option (CSV or Excel)Upon doing this, a new window appears with a message indicating that the report is being generated:
4. When the report is done being generated, users will be alerted via the Bell icon. Clicking the alert will bring them to the screen to download the report.
Previously, clicking either export button would open a new window and depending on the size of the report, it could hang, freeze or even time-out altogether. This new method of report generation prevents this from happening.
A note about Brightspace updates:
Brightspace uses a Continuous Delivery model for monthly updates and SUNY is part of “Wave 3” on the update schedule. Please see this Wave Schedule for the date range of when an update will be deployed: https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/1048-wave-schedule. Current, past and future release notes can also be located in the sidebar of this page.
I am going to be starting a new project based on using AI as an educational resource for both faculty and students. I will create a new searchable category for this here on the blog called “AI” in case anyone is interested in filtering down to this particular journey. I intend for this to move pretty quickly so as to hopefully deploy something while it is still in fact an emergent technology.
First little mention goes to this website tool that helps one understand the currency that this will be running on via MS Azure: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
When running this service, you operate with a quota of tokens, and the tokens cost money.
“Tokens in the context of OpenAI GPT models are clusters of characters representing the fundamental unit of text. These tokens are generated by a tokenizer algorithm that segregates text into smaller segments following certain rules, such as spaces, punctuation marks, and special characters.”