Blackboard’s gradebook has become a Grade Center, when Blackboard was upgraded  to version 8.0 in early May.

What’s new about the grade center?  Instructors can:

• enter grades directly into grade center cells (like a spreadsheet).
• freeze panes and scroll through grades to correlate student names with grades more easily.
• automatically drop lowest quiz score(s).
• display both Score and Percentage in the same column (or Percentage and Letter Grade).
• Smart View can display only those students in a particular section of a multi-section course.
• Smart Views can be used to display students meeting a particular criteria (e.g. “Below C-” or “missed exam”).
• exempt a graded item from the grade calculations.
• easily add a comment to any grade for the student to see.
• email students directly from the Grade Center (e.g. those who have not turned in an assignment).

There’s more! See our help pages, watch a video introduction, or read a brief summary describing the new features.

If you have not used the gradebook in Blackboard before, you might like the upgraded version, the Grade Center.

It’s summer – maybe you have some time to investigate “Cool Tools”, useful software or online sites for teaching.  This list was compiled by Joel Galbraith, an Instructional Analyst from School of Government, UNC, and presented at a recent Tri-IT meeting held at Elon University. Find something that will work for your course this fall!

• Prezi (presentation tool)  Sound familiar?  Shawn has described Prezi and used it during the CIT Showcase.
• EtherPad (pictured – realtime collaborative text editing)
• Mixed Ink (collaborate with the world for writing)
• TimZon (team zone) (asynchronous video discussions)
• VoiceThread (asynchronous conversation tool) Here’s an example of using VoiceThread in teaching.
• TinEye (reverse image lookup)
• Dimdim (free web conferencing)
• Poll Everywhere (SMS Polls and Voting)
• BrainFlips (Smart Flashcards)

Call us if you’d like some ideas for how to use any of these for teaching your course.

Princeton is one of the schools partnering with Amazon around uses of the Kindle in higher education. While many of the other schools in the pilot program are focusing on electronic textbooks, Princeton is especially interested in reducing printing. The Library and OIT at Princeton are co-sponsoring the pilot project, with support from a foundation that will enable them to offer the devices at no cost to about 50 students. The library will scan e-reserves in Optical Character Recognition form, which will enable students to annotate the readings. This may reduce students printing out e-reserves. An article in the Daily Princetonian provides more information: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/05/08/23660/ as does a website about the pilot project: http://www.princeton.edu/ereaderpilot/.

An article about a Wikipedia hoax that reinforces the notion that while Wikipedia can be a good starting point for research, it needs to be followed up with serious fact-checking. The article also serves as a reminder that care is needed with any published information source.

Amazon’s popular e-book reader is expected to get an upgrade this week with a unit being released that has a larger screen.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon, in conjunction with the release of the larger Kindle, has entered into agreements with textbook publishers to offer material on the device.  In addition, six universities will be testing the new Kindle with textbooks in the Fall – Case Western, Pace, Princeton, Reed, Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State.

article at Wall Street Journal

At our recent Instructional Technology Showcase, we created a presentation to celebrate CIT’s ten year anniversary using a new web-based presentation tool called Prezi. Prezi allows users to create a presentation with several levels of magnification – so instead of moving from one slide to the next, you can zoom into areas of the presentation for more info. In contrast to a standard PowerPoint presentation, a Prezi provides opportunities to create a more interactive, contextual and dynamic presentation.

I’ve embedded a YouTube video of the CIT Prezi below.

You can watch the Prezi in full screen by visiting our presentation here. NOTE: After it loads, click the right pointing arrow to move through the presentation. Holding down the right arrow will open options to automatically move through the slides (if we can truly call each zone of a Prezi a ’slide’) at intervals of 2, 10 or 20 seconds a slide. To start the presentation over, hold down the left pointing arrow and choose the looping arrow icon.

Creating the CIT 10th Anniversary Prezi

For a quick overview of the process involved with building a Prezi, I’ll walk through the steps we went through to create the CIT 10th Anniversary presentation.

(more…)