The Blackboard saga continues

People are feeling more comfortable with Bb on their own. I helped two teachers move and arrange assignments and folders the way they wanted them. I find that teachers have the skills, but just don't trust themselves. I guess there is the fear with technology that once you delete it is gone forever.

I have made two more jings about making a course available and changing the entry page. (I will post these, once I figure out how to shrink the screen size of an embedded jing.) I would like to start my Bb course with a blog, but I cannot wrap my mind around how to start it. I appreciate Kim G. for having me as a student in her course that starts with a blog as the entry point. I also appreciate K.C. for encouraging me to play with the colors and fonts on my blog.

Blackboard...Renaming a Course

Blackboard...Clean Up the Front Page

The debate continues in our school about how to best use Bb to suit the needs of our students. Grade level courses? Period courses? Content courses by team? Content courses by grade level? At this point, I am thinking content courses by grade level, where possible, would be a great way to fuel the push for collaboration and formative assessments.

I am becoming less of a Bb fan each day, but it is a tool we have and does have more power than I give it credit. With this said, I am going to stick to it and test some of the new tools in the upgraded version.

One irritating point is the mess of a screen that opens when I log in, but I created some jings to solve some of that issue.
How to Clean Up the First Page

Jing to Save a Marriage

For my online class, I was supposed to create a narrowcast for my classroom. However, I thought I would use technology to solve a problem in my house... my husband does NOT use a calendar. I sent out an email to my entire family to celebrate my daughter's 4th birthday on a specific date only to find out that there is some golf outing that day. So, here is a jing giving my husband specific (narrow) directions on how to use our calendar online.

Ok, I will have to post it later. Blogger does not like the swf file format.

Absorption and Dausing

Absorption is my soaking up of technology resources available to educators. Dausing is my, Kerry Daus', dousing others with information that I have learned. This is my blog, my sponge, to post information about my learning and sharing with colleagues about technology tools to use in the classroom.
Some web 2.0 resources that I have used are:
http://www.glogster.com/ - online poster creator- awesome to add video and audio
http://www.voicethread.com/ - a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images
http://www.jing.com/ - free program download to capture anything you see on your computer screen and share it instantly!
http://www.xtranormal.com - text-to-movie website
http://www.yammer.com/ - workplace twitter- online collaboration!


My reads:
Currently, I am participating in Scott McCloud's online book club. We are reading Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham. I am also participating in Mark Richardson's online book study. We are reading Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson.