ITSpotlight is designed to keep the campus up to date on ITS activities and services.
Blackboard: End-of-Semester Activities for Faculty
Posted November 28, 2017
The following are suggested end-of-semester activities for faculty using Blackboard. Please contact ITS for questions or assistance at 618-650-5500.
- Check your Grade Center Total and/or Weighted Total column(s) to be sure they are set up to calculate correctly.
- The Mercer University Online Weighted Average Grade Calculator is a useful tool for checking your Weighted Total calculations. If you find errors and need assistance, please contact ITS at 618-650-5500 or at help@siue.edu.
... - The Mercer University Online Weighted Average Grade Calculator is a useful tool for checking your Weighted Total calculations. If you find errors and need assistance, please contact ITS at 618-650-5500 or at help@siue.edu.
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Omeka Authoring System Gives Students Digital Publishing Experience
Posted November 22, 2017
By: Marlee Graser, Lovejoy Library
Omeka is a content management system gaining popularity among libraries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions as an easy method for building digital collections and exhibits. It is also being adopted by faculty and students looking for a digital publishing pathway that is simple, cost-effective, and has extensible options for describing nearly any object.
Here at SIUE, Omeka is used both as a resource for producing digital born scholarship and creat...
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Making Your Blackboard Course More Mobile Friendly
Posted November 21, 2017
By: Laura Million
In a 2017 survey conducted by Educause, 97% of undergraduate students surveyed said they owned a smartphone and 53% owned a tablet. Of the students who use these mobile devices in class, 47% reported that their smartphones were very or extremely important to their academic success and 38% reported the same about their tablets. 1
Many faculty, on the other hand, rely on a laptop or desktop computer to design and facilitate Blackboard courses. In fact, some may never look at a ...
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Taking it Further: Extend Mobile Presence in Your Teaching Activities
Posted November 21, 2017
By: Laura Million
In the past, learning technologists have thought of mobile devices as consumption oriented, not production oriented. We tend to use mobile devices to view materials, rather than to produce or create materials. As an example, you would not expect your student to write a final paper on a smartphone (although some dare to try this feat each semester), but you might expect them to check in on a discussion board or course announcement. More and more, however, mobile devices are bei...
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New Inline Grading Option for Blackboard Assignments
Posted October 24, 2017
By: Laura Million
Blackboard has upgraded the Assignment tool to include inline grading. Inline grading allows you to comment directly on a student's paper in Blackboard. You will no longer have to download a student's paper, mark it up, and upload back to Blackboard. If you use Turnitin, you will be familiar with the feature.
See the Knowledge Base article "Grade a Blackboard Assignment" for more details.
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2017 Teaching with Technology Award Winner Announced
Posted October 06, 2017
By: Matt Schmitz
Dr. Susanne James has been recognized as the winner of the 2017 Teaching with Technology Award. The award is part of the annual Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference hosted by the University of Missouri-St. Louis. It recognizes faculty who have used pedagogy or technology in innovative or effective ways in the traditional, hybrid, or online classroom.
Dr. James, an associate professor in the Teaching and Learning Department in the SIUE School of Health, Educatio...
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Blackboard’s Retention Center Helps Faculty Identify At-Risk Students
Posted October 06, 2017
By: Laura Million
Midterm is approaching fast. Do you know how your students are doing? Are they all handing in their assignments on time? Are they logging into Blackboard to check course materials?
The Retention Center provides you an opportunity to recognize "at-risk" students. The main table displays:
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Missed Deadlines - The alert is based on a defined due date for an assignment, test, or survey. Late submissions trigger an alert based on the option...
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Follow ITS on Twitter
Posted October 06, 2017
Are you a Twitter user? Follow @siueits for training announcements, tech updates, teaching strategies, course design, and more.
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ITS System Status Tool Alerts You to Outages
Posted October 06, 2017
By: Jeff Price
Have you ever wondered if the system you are trying to use is down for everyone or if it is just your computer? With this scenario in mind, ITS is happy to announce the launch of our new systems status page. This new addition will help the University community track outages, performance issues, and scheduled maintenance of the systems that impact them the most.
The page, located at https://status.siue.edu, uses a simple coding system which shows ...
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SIUE Faculty Uses Web Timeline to Enhance History Course
Posted October 06, 2017
By: Niki Glick
Steve Tamari, professor of historical studies at SIUE, needed a tool to allow his students to build an interactive timeline for his class on World History Since 1500 CE. The project, called "The World and Me," requires students to think about how their lives intersect with the modern world history they are studying. This "intersection of histories" could be in relation to a variety of personal experiences, such as the student's family, hometown, or hobbies. Dr. ...
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IDLT: Your Resource for Course Design and Learning Technology
Posted September 08, 2017
By: Jennifer Albat
Are you interested in refining a course, creating better assessments, incorporating a new learning technology, or creating online tutorials? Whether the format is face-to-face, blended, or online, the ITS Instructional Design & Learning Technologies group is available to assist you. In addition to becoming more familiar with learning technologies, you can identify the best strategies to increase efficiency and interactivity in your course and discover other ways to deliver in...
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Class Size Matters: Faculty Perspective
Posted September 08, 2017
By: Wayne Nelson
Decisions about the impact of class size on student learning are complicated and important, balancing faculty welfare, student learning, and institutional resources. Such decisions are often based on tacit assumptions about teaching and learning that are reflected in academic program structures and campus physical environments. We use what we’ve had for years (even centuries). Classrooms hold about 30-40 students, small seminar rooms allow 10-15 students, and lecture spac...
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New Blackboard Features Fall 2017
Posted September 08, 2017
By: Laura Million
Following are some of the new features in Blackboard this semester:
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Drag and drop to add files (faculty & students)
Blackboard's new "drag and drop" feature lets you upload course files more quickly and easily than before. Wherever you see a bold dashed line around the "Browse My Computer" button in Blackboard you can drag one or more files from your computer and drop them into the box to upload. The feature is available to both faculty (e....
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Poll Everywhere Comes to Campus
Posted September 08, 2017
By: Jonathan Coons and Emily Keener
Poll Everywhere, a mobile-only audience response system, replaced Turning Technologies clickers at SIUE this fall. To make integrating this new classroom technology a little easier, we wanted to share a few tips from Poll Everywhere and ITS:
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Make sure students are connected to our wireless network. Since students are using tablets, laptops, or most likely, cell phones to respond to polls, they will need reliable online access. SIUE's wireless...
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Upcoming Technology Training Sessions
Posted September 08, 2017
By: Niki Glick
There are several ITS training sessions and workshops scheduled for the upcoming weeks and months. Check out the calendar here: http://www.siue.edu/its/fac_staff/training/
However, in an effort to become more efficient and flexible, ITS continues to produce and offer more self-paced, interactive online training. Some of these resources are available via the training page linked above and others are available in the ITS Knowledgebase (https://k...
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Introducing The ITS KnowledgeBase
Posted September 07, 2017
By: Niki Glick
SIUE Information Technology Services is excited to introduce the ITS KnowledgeBase(KB). The KB is designed to be your on-demand resource for FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and how-to articles for a variety of technologies (computers, mobile devices, learning technologies, etc.) and products (Office365, Blackboard, Zoom, etc.). The KB is available 24/7 and will continue to be updated with even more helpful articles. Watch the :30 second video below to learn more and start using the...
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