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"Retrieving legacy files As the old dropbox knew no separation of files by assignment (one of its major limitations), it was not possible to move these files into assignments during the upgrade, and there is no storage area facility available into which they could have been moved, so they are not directly accessible within the application after an upgrade or in courses restored from earlier versions. The old dropbox code used Perl, which has been completely removed from the web application in release 9, so the dropbox cannot be accessed anymore to retrieve the legacy files. A rudimentary Java-based interface is being provided to enable each user individually to download any legacy files they may wish to retrieve. These files can then be submitted in newly created assignments as desired or stored in one's Virtual Hard Drive inside the Blackboard Content System, if that is licensed by the institution and enabled by the system administrator. Unfortunately this interface is not exposed via any link in the application. System administrators or helpdesk staff can however make available such a link to their users, either assisting them with file retrieval on an individual basis or by publishing the download link to their users, e.g. in a system announcement. Community Engagement license holders may also wish to add an HTML portal module with this link, thus simplifying the download process, or add it as external link to the tool panel (in the portal menu column). The location of this interface (relative to your server root) is: /webapps/blackboard/execute/ddb It is important to note that this is not a file system location. You actually have to access the URL via a web browser! Sample HTML for a portal module named something like "Digital Dropbox Download": Download your digital dropbox files here When a user accesses this link, he will either see a message that no files were found for him, or a list of courses in w

Think-Pair-Share is a strategy designed to provide students with "food for thought" on a given topics enabling them to formulate individual ideas and share these ideas with another student. It is a learning strategy developed by Lyman and associates to encourage student classroom participation. What is Think, Pair, Share? Think-Pair-Share is a strategy designed to provide students with "food for thought" on a given topics enabling them to formulate individual ideas and share these ideas with another student. It is a learning strategy developed by Lyman and associates to encourage student classroom participation. Rather than using a basic recitation method in which a teacher poses a question and one student offers a response, Think-Pair-Share encourages a high degree of pupil response and can help keep students on task. What is its purpose? * Providing "think time" increases quality of student responses. * Students become actively involved in thinking about the concepts presented in the lesson. * Research tells us that we need time to mentally "chew over" new ideas in order to store them in memory. When teachers present too much information all at once, much of that information is lost. If we give students time to "think-pair-share" throughout the lesson, more of the critical information is retained. * When students talk over new ideas, they are forced to make sense of those new ideas in terms of their prior knowledge. Their misunderstandings about the topic are often revealed (and resolved) during this discussion stage. * Students are more willing to participate since they don't feel the peer pressure involved in responding in front of the whole class. * Think-Pair-Share is easy to use on the spur of the moment. * Easy to use in large classes. How can I do it? * With students seated in teams of 4, have them number them from 1 to 4. * Announce a discussion topic or problem to solve. (Example: Which room in our school is larg

One of the most interesting features of the iPad 2 (cameras and thinner design aside) is the possibility to activate video mirroring: thanks to Apple's Digital AV Adapter or VGA Adapter, any app on your iPad 2 can be mirrored on the television's bigger screen with just an additional cable and no setup required. It works out of the box - meaning all your apps, presentations and websites can be sent off to a monitor that supports HDMI or VGA. This has been touted as one great functionality of the iPad 2 especially among teachers and people who always wished to mirror the iPad's display to an external monitor during business meetings.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.

"Nearpod enables teachers to use their iPads to manage content on students' devices. It combines presentation, engagement and real-time assessment tools into one integrated solution."

From an LMS provider's standpoint, the more open and flexible the LMS, the more it can be integrated with other programs for robust analysis of student activity and interaction.  According to Lou Pugliese, president of online learning solutions provider  Moodlerooms, that kind of integration is needed. Technologies exist to measure student data and interactions on a large scale, Pugliese says: The focus now is how to effectively collect data and conduct reporting on-demand within the LMS. "Over the past ten years, the LMS has managed to record the most basic of student interactions and activity, but we've barely scratched the surface in enabling universities to analyze data on an institutional level," says Pugliese. "However, new developments in analytical technologies will provide educators with the ability to measure interactions within the ever-popular collaborative tools present in today's LMS environments. Moving beyond simple traffic reporting to more comprehensive online behaviour analysis will be critical to make more effective intervention decisions."  

purchasing a captioning solution such as DOC Soft (www.docsoft.com). This is a piece of hardware that enables you run all you video files through and the technology spits out caption files (the caption files are not always 100% accurate, so you need to do some quality assurance). It also allows for setting up profiles where you can train the technology to improve the accuracy rate, which is especially useful for videos recorded in-house by repeat faculty.

Next Generation Learning Challenges means to Dramatically increase college readiness and completion by fostering the development and adoption of technologies that enable more flexible, high-quality learning experiences for all students.

"InstantAtlas™ enables information analysts and research professionals to create highly-interactive web solutions that combine statistics and map data to improve data visualization, enhance communication, and engage people in more informed decision making."

Timelines enable chunking. Another ideal feature of timelines is that by their nature, they chunk information. Because events on a timeline occur at a point in time or during a segment of time, you're residing in a chunking environment. Chunk away!Timelines are a good source for interactions. Asking learners to build their own timeline or to drag and drop events on a timeline can make an effective online learning activity.

Make it snow on your blog: Wordpress or blogger

These tours will demonstrate how easy it is to read websites aloud with BrowseAloud and how to personalise your settings to suit your individual needs or preferences.