Heidi Olson

We’ve been told that some Grade item Categories may have changed when OIT upgraded Blackboard earlier this month. If you use weighted grades by category you might want to review the category descriptions to make sure they are correct.

Look here for a short list of the some new features found in the upgrade to Blackboard in Version 8. Highlights of the Discussion Board and GradeCenter, as well as features of new tools coming soon!

In keeping with the tradition of giving thanks for the upcoming holiday, I’ve been thinking about what makes my work-life easier and how thankful I am for having such a tool to help me manage the tremendous amount of information that is out there. This tool would be my RSS feed aggregator! There are many of these types of tools available Google Reader, Netvibes, Newsgator, Blogbridge, and many more, but I’ve chosen to use Bloglines as the one place I can go and see what’s new in topics that are of interest to me.

My feed reader takes the RSS feeds that I subscribe to and keeps track of when something new is posted to that blog, wiki, discussion forum or website. Instead of having to visit each of these sites, I rely on Bloglines to keep track of that for me. I can go to one place on the web, browse through my list of subscriptions and make a choice on whether or not I want to see what’s new. I almost never have time to review all the new items in one sitting. I can quickly run through my list, select the ones that are most important at that time and read the headlines. There are certain subscriptions that I look at every day, sometimes more than once. But sometimes the number of new items grows until it looks even too large for me to look at; its too overwhelming. Then I simply clear them out and let the aggregator start over at 1. If I missed something I can always go back to the inital website and look for it. For example: I subscribed to several blogs that aggregate posts from other blogs on a similar topic. This syndicated blog might post twenty new items every day. If I miss one day of looking at the new posts then the number quickly adds up. Most often, out of the twenty posts there might be only one post that is actually meaningful to me. When the number grows too big I know I will never look at all of them so its just easier to clear it out. Its almost like all those boxes that I have in storage. There are things that have been there for about two years. Most likely I could just give the box away. I probably wouldn’t miss anything. And what a feeling of freedom that would be! (not too save a $$ savings!)

Also available is something called RSS-narrator, like TalkingNews which takes your text-only feeds and converts them to podcasts so you can listen to the articles on your ipod or other mp3 player. I haven’t tried this out but it seems like a pretty handy thing to have especially if you had a long commute to make each day.

For more information on RSS and Aggregators check out commoncraft.com for an easy to understand explantion on RSS.

List of Aggregators on Wikipedia

Comparision of Aggregators on Wikipedia

What’s your favorite digital tool that you give thanks for?

I’ve become a big fan of “toread+“. I have it in my toolbar in my Firefox 3 browser.

When I’m researching a topic I usually start with a search in a search engine and begin to gather websites that contain interesting and relevant content. I open links as I find them in new tabs in my browser. At some point I get overwhelmed by the number of tabs or I find a sufficient amount of information that I’m looking for and then I start to sift through it. Most often I find myself spending way too much time on it and decide to move on to another task before completing my research. I don’t really want to muddle up my bookmarks with links to these open tabs since I probably won’t need them more than once or twice. I could move them to my delicious.com social bookmarking account but once, again, they aren’t necessarily topics that I want to keep and the links may not have relevance to others who are following my newly added delicious feeds. I may not have had time to determine if they are really good resources and want to be reminded to look back at them. I also don’t want to spend too much time finding these links again as I probably want to get back to the topic within a day or two.

This is where” toread+” comes in. Like I mentioned before, I have it showing as a link on my toolbar so while I’m on a web page that I want to be reminded of I can click the link and I can send myself an email that has the web address listed in it. I also have the capability to add a short comment about the link so I can customize the email’s subject line.

This also works well for me when I’m in a meeting/conference/class/presentation and someone mentions a web address that I want to get back to when I have more time to spend on it. I can send myself an email reminder and then determine how important it is to me to keep at a later time. I normally don’t keep one of these emails in my inbox more than a day or so. I find time to determine the webpage’s importance and then move on and delete it or give it permanent home in one of my other social tools.

For me, using email to manage things like this has been working well. I know that some people prefer not to fill up their inbox with a lot of messages so this tool might not appeal to them. I’m able to keep a pretty clean inbox and archive (or trash) most of my incoming mail, move tasks to a todo list (I use todoist), send bookmarks to delicious, or categorize my messages.

For more information look at: http://toread.cc/howtouse.php

There’s also a tool called Read it Later – I haven’t tried it yet but I’m thinking about installing it and seeing if it has more features that work with my work style. In fact, I found several references to it yesterday and used my toread+ tool to send myself a couple of links as email reminders!

You might find yourself wanting to limit searchs to specfic sites, ones that you deam reliable and accurate. You can create a custom search engine that you can use for your use or to distrubute to students through google. Whether it is one website, multiple websites, or individual web pages, you designate which places should be included. Examples include a teacher who wanted to limit her students to finding resources within specific websites that she had pre-approved, an institution creating a custom search for student-related issues, a tech-related custom search composed of trusted resources, and more.

Using discussion in an asynchronous course can be an effective way to provide student-to-student interaction in an otherwise teacher-to-student atmosphere and helps to build a sense of community between students and/or teacher. Students are able to develop ideas gained from the content, verbalize those ideas in writing, and observe what other student’s ideas are and how they might be similar or different from one’s own perspective. Presenting the content back to the class can be a valuable exercise and a key to really understanding the goals of the lesson. For some students this will be a big challenge.

Success of a discussion board thread relies on these factors:

1. You need to have a sufficient enrollment size of those participating to allow posts and enough comments to become a conversation. Follow through is an important element to creating a richer environment.
2. Students need to be in or near the same place in the content to make the conversation flow and feel like they are getting sufficient responses to their ideas. It can be very discouraging when a thought goes uncommented on. Students may ask, “Was I completely off?” “Was what I said offensive?” “Is anyone out there?” It might be helpful to establish posting deadlines.
3. The instructor has to decide what role he or she will be playing in the conversation, ranging from being fully active where all posts get instructor’s feedback to that of one who lurks and participates only when the conversation becomes offensive or completely off topic.
4. And probably the most important factor is starting out with a thought-provoking, carefully worded question or discussion statement.

Assessing Discussion Forum activity can be a daunting experience and can be susceptible to personal preference and emotion. Most successful discussions require both an original post plus comments on other posts and follow-up on comments made to one’s own ideas. By using an easy to understand rubric, students should be able to enhance discussion and create a respectful and engaging community and the grader should be able to assign points that are fair and consistent.

Criteria/Proficiency could include such items as listed in this example. You probably don’t want to include all of the criteria areas in your class. Pick those categories that work best for your class content and organization. Choices should be limited to about four or five categories.