IRT Technology Update
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
01. Drexel Employee Account Terminations
02. Korman Printing Station Will No Longer Accept Cash
03. Check Out LinkEdu and SkyDrive!
04. What Happens to Dunx1 When You Graduate?
News & Notes on Online Learning
05. Bb Vista Class Availability
06. Save the Date: Drexel’s Institute on Innovation
07. Wimba Pronto Now Available in Bb Vista
08. Summer is the Perfect Time to Clean Up Your Bb Vista Course List!
09. Camtasia Studio 5 - Available to Your Students
10. Wimba Classroom Demo and Training Sessions
11. Tracking Student Progress in Blackboard Vista
12. Crosslisting Course Sections for Summer Quarter
13. Browser News: Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1
14. What Happened to Speech Recognition in Office 2007?
15. Wimba Classroom Enhancements
The Accounts office of IRT receives standard employee termination lists from Human Resources on a daily basis. These lists allows us to terminate account access as appropriate and necessary.
If your office requires an immediate account termination, please use the template located at http://www.drexel.edu/hr/deptadmin/terminations.html, and email it to disableaccounts@drexel.edu. All the information collected by the template is necessary to make the appropriate access changes by IRT, Security, Procurement, Accounts Payable, Finance, Telecom, etc.
As of July 30, 2008, the Korman Center printing station will no longer accept cash. Individuals who wish to use the printing station must use either Ultima funds or Dragon Card funds. Increments of as little as $1 can be added to a Dragon Card for printing purposes. Printing charges will remain unchanged.
Students and faculty should load funds onto their Dragon Cards or have Ultima funds available before coming into Korman Center. These funds can be obtained at W. W. Hagerty Library and at the Creese Student Center. The library provides a self-service station in the computer/printer area, and funds can be added to a Dragon Card at the Dragon Card Office in Creese.
Drexel and LinkEdu, which is comprised of Microsoft’s Exchange Labs and Hotmail as well as Google’s Gmail, are now partnered to offer students the option to activate an external email account alongside their official Drexel email account.
In addition to these side-by-side services, both of the Microsoft email accounts offer SkyDrive, a remote storage service that offers 5 GB of free storage space and is accessible from any PC or Web-enabled mobile device.
For more information about SkyDrive, visit http://www.drexel.edu/irt/linkedu/microsoft/SkyDrive.html.
For more information about LinkEdu, visit http://www.drexel.edu/irt/linkedu/.
To activate any or all of the LinkEdu accounts available, visit http://accounts.drexel.edu.
When students enroll at Drexel University, they are given an email, domain, and DrexelOne account. They are also allowed to activate a Dunx1 account, which provides 100 MB of personal space for files or Web pages. The Dunx1 account can be accessed from a campus computer or remotely.
But what happens to all of the data placed in a Dunx1 account when a student graduates from Drexel? 30 days after students graduate, their shell access to dunx1.irt.drexel.edu via direct login is deactivated. Therefore, graduates should back up all of their files from Dunx1 onto a more permanent, accessible medium.
Also, students are encouraged to review the contents of their www.pages.drexel.edu/~userid Web pages. These pages are retrievable via search engines such as Google, so make sure that your page contains items you wouldn’t mind others seeing.
News & Notes on Online Learning
For the summer term, Bb Vista classes are available to students between the following dates and times:
Term start date: Monday, June 23, 2008 at 12:00 AM
Term end date: Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 11:59 PM
Instructors can change when their courses are available on the system. For step-by-step instructions, go to http://www.drexel.edu/IRT_new/services/Bbvista/howToChangeDates.html.
Contact the Online Learning Team at olt@drexel.edu or 215-895-1224 with any questions.
IRT will sponsor a two-day "Institute on Innovation in Training and Teaching" on Thursday, September 11 and Friday, September 12, 2008.
The Institute will provide courses for trainers and educators interested in moving their instruction online. Classes will meet the needs of individuals moving to training or teaching online as well as experienced online instructors who seek instruction in advanced media integration. The Institute will offer eight, three-hour courses on topics of interest to the corporate training sector, K-20 educators and lifelong learning professionals. It will highlight a wide variety of tools available for producing creative, quality online materials.
Registration information and a detailed agenda will be posted at http://www.drexel.edu/irt/innovation on July 1, 2008. Save the dates and register early; space is limited.
Wimba Pronto is a free instant messaging and voice chat tool that allows students and instructors to meet live online at any time to discuss their coursework. Using the free downloadable software (Mac OSX and Windows only), members can send instant messages to individuals or groups, use voice-over IP, see who else is online, add avatars and create personal contact lists.
Wimba Pronto integrates with Bb Vista to automatically populate student and faculty contact lists each term (or semester) with the instructor’s course rosters. Since accounts pull information directly from the Bb Vista system, instructors and students can clearly see who is contacting them and whether or not they are a member of the Drexel community.
Anyone logged into Bb Vista can follow the link on the Bb Vista Home page to create a new Pronto account, or instructors can add the tool to their sections from the “Add Content Link” drop-down menu. Once an account has been created, students and faculty can communicate without even logging in to the Vista system.
To learn more about Pronto, email olt@drexel.edu or visit the Wimba Pronto site at http://www.wimba.com/products/wimbapronto.
Are your summer courses difficult to find on your Bb Vista Home course list? Instructors can hide previous courses and/or move their summer courses to the top of the list in the “Edit Course List” screen.
First, click on “Edit Course List” (looks like a pencil icon) on the Bb Vista Home page. Any course with a “Hide Link” button next to it is currently visible and can be hidden with this option; to hide it, toggle the button to “Show Link.” To hide many courses at once, place a checkmark in the boxes to the left of the course names, click the “Hide” button at the bottom of the screen and then click “OK.”
To move one or more courses up or down in the list, place a checkmark in the box(es) to the left of the course name(s), click on the left-most icon in the row above or below which the course(s) will be moved and then click on “Move Selected Above” or “Move Selected Below.”
To return to Bb Vista Home, click on the “Bb Vista Home” tab in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
IRT can help instructors with students who would benefit from their own copy of Camtasia Studio 5 for class projects or assignments. The Online Learning Team has software licenses available for this application, and can even do remote installs for students.
Send an email to the team at olt@drexel.edu, call us at x1224, or stop by Korman 109 to discuss how to proceed.
The Wimba Showcase hosted by IRT on June 17th was a huge success. Based on feedback that IRT received, monthly sessions have been scheduled so that individuals can learn more about this synchronous feature within Bb Vista as well as Bb Classic. Sessions will be held in Korman 116 as follows:
- • Thursday, July 10 - 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM
- • Friday, August 15 - 10:00 AM - Noon
- • Tuesday, September 23 - 10:00 AM - Noon
Instructors will learn how easy it is to add a synchronous room to each class, and they will pick up some great tips and tricks to make real-time text and audio discussions with their students more rewarding and pedagogically effective.
To save a seat, email the Online Learning Team at olt@drexel.edu.
Instructors can track student activity in their Bb Vista environment.
Tracking is easy to use:
- • Click on the “Teach” tab
- • Click on “Tracking” in the Instructor Tools area in the lower part of the left-hand pane
- • Click on the radio button for Student Tracking
- • Specify start and end dates/times for the range needed
- • Click on the “Run Report” button
PLEASE NOTE: Overnight, each day, student tracking data is updated. There is a minor lag in the availability of tracking data; for example, if a tracking report is run at 8:00 AM on a Tuesday, the report will NOT include student activity that might have taken place between about midnight and 8:00 AM that day. (In this case, the report can be considered as “student activity through and including Monday.”) Despite the lag, tracking student activity can be a powerful tool that enables instructors to determine ahead of time which students might need help.
The crosslisting process combines students from different sections into one environment in Bb Vista. To learn more about crosslisting and what it can accomplish, view this slideshow at http://www.drexel.edu/IRT_new/services/Bbvista/videos/crosslisting/Crosslists_De-Mystified.html.
It might be too late to crosslist sections in Banner for this term. However, IRT can still crosslist on the Bb Vista side as long as no students have begun to use the Bb Vista sections.
To have IRT crosslist your sections, send an email to olt@drexel.edu with all of the details, including your Bb Vista username, the full names of the sections (e.g., ENG-101-001), and the 5-digit section CRNs.
On June 17th, Mozilla released the much-anticipated, latest version of their Firefox web browser: 3.0! This version introduces a number of time- and effort-saving features, such as one-click bookmarking, better history tracking and improved security.
Several members of the Online Learning Team have been using Firefox 3 with Bb Vista on both Windows and Macintosh computers, and have found compatibility to be comparable to Firefox 2. However, it is important to note that Blackboard has not yet certified Firefox 3 for use with Bb Vista, so there is no guarantee of compatibility. If individuals choose to upgrade to Firefox 3, they should be aware that the Browser Check will report that they are using an unsupported browser and that they might have some issues using Bb Vista. No information is available as to when Blackboard will certify Firefox 3, but additional details will be provided as they are received.
For Macintosh users, Safari 3.1 has also not yet been formally certified for use with Bb Vista, though it appears to be detected as "Safari 3.0.x”, which is certified and supported in Mac OS X 10.4 and newer. Still, some users have reported intermittent issues such as crashes when uploading files. In general, Firefox 2 or 3 offers a more stable experience in Bb Vista, but neither browser provides access to the HTML editor. For individuals who rely on this feature, the only option is to use Safari.
Individuals who used speech recognition through the Microsoft Office “Language Bar” to dictate into Word 2003 might be wondering how to install the Language Bar for Office 2007. Individuals who are using Windows Vista cannot install it -- instead, Microsoft has built speech recognition into the operating system so that it can be available for all applications.
To set up speech recognition in Windows Vista, go to Speech Recognition Options in the “Ease of Access” Control Panel. For more information, see “Set up Speech Recognition” at http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/50c5dd28-9f8a-429e-9669-a42a292cea231033.mspx, or the more general “Windows Speech Recognition” at http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/windowsvista/speech.aspx.
If users have upgraded to Office 2007 but not to Windows Vista, they must use a third-party product such as Dragon Naturally Speaking for speech recognition.
For information on installing and configuring speech recognition in Office 2003, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826851/en-us.
IRT has upgraded to the latest version of Wimba. In this new version, there is one key change in Wimba Classroom -- one that you have been asking for, actually.
Presenters and their participants can now resize the text chat frame (as well as the participant and branding frames) at the bottom of the screen!
To resize the text chat box in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, simply:
- • Rest the mouse pointer over the horizontal, heavy border that is just above the text box (and below the horizontal toolbar).
- • Make sure that the cursor changes into the vertical, double-headed arrow.
- • Click and drag the border up until the text box is the desired height, and then release the mouse button.
Enlarging the text box will make the eBoard smaller.
The text box can also be made wider by following the same steps with the vertical border that is at the right edge of the text box. Widening the text box will make the participant frame smaller.
Each presenter or viewer controls only their own display. So, if you are the presenter, adjusting the size of the text box does not alter the display for any Wimba Classroom participants who are in the virtual room.
To read previous issues of the IRT Technology Update, go to http://www.drexel.edu/irt/news/technews/.
To manage your subscription options to the IRT Technology Update and other Drexel Announcements, go to http://www.drexel.edu/irt/subscriptions. If you prefer to receive a plain text version, please email your request to mailreq@drexel.edu. |
