Archives for June 2009

Blackboard Maintenance on Sunday, June 28

June 25, 2009 by

Blackboard_Logo.jpg
Blackboard will be unavailable this Sunday, June 28, from 7:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. The outage is due to maintenance being performed on network firewall software.

Please call the Help Desk with questions about this or any other issue at 573-341-HELP (4357).

Filed Under: Blackboard

Netbooks: A Transitional Technology

June 11, 2009 by

netboook-smartphone-01.pngWe here at EdTech Enterprises have recently been examining the possibility of using a “netbook” for some applications instead of heavier and more bulky standard laptop or tablet PCs.

However, I recently came across a couple of good articles that look at some of advantages and disadvantages of netbooks in comparison to other technologies.

Jeff Medcalf at the Eternity Road blog investigates whether netbooks are actually useful. He lays out his criteria in terms of the use cases and function points of the most widely used technology. Basically, each technology needs to match up what the technology can actually do (its function points) against what people actually want or need to do (use cases). We do this all the time in EdTech with faculty. In many instances we try to find out what an instructor wants to do and then try to find the appropriate technology to match that need.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: New Technology, Technology Evaluation

Blackboard Maintenance on Friday, June 12

June 4, 2009 by

Blackboard_Logo.jpg
Blackboard will be unavailable between 5:30 pm and 10:00 pm on Friday, June 12, during the regularly scheduled maintenance window. System administrators will be applying patches during this outage.

For more information, please contact the Help Desk at (573) 341-HELP.

Filed Under: Blackboard

New CLICKER / TURNINGPOINT Features Compatible with Blackboard

June 2, 2009 by

turningpoint-blackboard.pngEdTech has recently turned on the Blackboard Wizard in TurningPoint. This allows TurningPoint features to be compatible with Blackboard. Specifically, TurningPoint can now do the following tasks:

  • Register clickers in Blackboard — students can now register their clickers in Blackboard instead of having to register their clickers at the Bookstore. Students simply need to login to their clicker-enabled course and register their clicker for that course. (Accessed through Blackboard.)
  • Import participation lists from Blackboard — Instructors can download participation lists directly from Blackboard into TurningPoint. This makes is easier for instructors to keep their participation lists up to date as students add/drop clicker courses. (Accessed through TurningPoint.)
  • Export session data to Blackboard — Instead of a complicated series of steps to move your session data from a TurningPoint Excel spreadsheet into the Blackboard Grade Center, you can export your session data directly to the Bb Grade Center, creating new columns for each session you want to export. This makes it much, much easier to integrate your “clicker points” with your other participation grade points in Blackboard. (Accessed through TurningPoint.)

Click one of the links above to view instructions on how to perform
each of the three tasks — Registering clickers, importing participation lists, and exporting session data.

Feel free to contact EdTech if you have any questions or concerns about any of these three new processes for managing clickers / TurningPoint.

Filed Under: Blackboard, Clickers, TurningPoint