Category: Announcements
Blackboard Learn: What can it do for you?
In continuation of CEIT’s and IS&T’s efforts to engage faculty in the LMS migration, CEIT hosted a presentation on Blackboard Learn that focused on how faculty can use it for their course. Participants from the Blackboard Learn pilot were present to share their ideas and experience with the new environment. Some topics included:
- Collaboration tools in Blackboard: With this new system comes new tools and features. In terms of student collaboration, the three that are most significant are blogs, journals and wikis. Blogs allow students to share their personal thoughts with their classmates and gives them their own voice in the class. Journals, on the other hand, are designed to be a private communication between an instructor and a student. Finally, wikis are collaborative documents that allow students to edit each other’s work.
- Assignments and Rubrics: Faculty now have the ability to attached rubrics to their assignments, making grading more transparent to the students and much simpler for the instructor. Additionally, assignments are the new and improved way of accepting documents from students.
For more information on the presentation, please feel free to reach out to CEIT (cent@bu.edu) or the presenter, Kacie Cleary (kmcleary@bu.edu).
BU Today: Read & Write GOLD for learning disabilities
Today’s issue of BU Today features an article highlighting Read & Write GOLD, literacy software that helps students with reading, writing, research, and organization. The software is available to the BU community for free download via TechWeb. It is especially helpful for students with learning disabilities but can be useful for anyone, especially in language-learning classes. See the article for more about how BU got Read & Write GOLD and what it can do for students.
Fifth Annual Instructional Innovation Conference
On Friday, March 8 CEIT will hold its fifth annual Instructional Innovation Conference.
Have you been innovating in your classes? Other faculty would like to hear what you’re doing! Please visit 2013 Submission Process to read about the innovation submission process. You may also visit 2012 Instructional Innovation Abstracts to find abstracts and presentations from last year’s Conference. Submissions are due by December 10, 2012. If you have any suggestions for the program, please contact Lauren Hess at ceit@bu.edu or 617-353-8718. We hope to see you there!
Also, it’s not too late to register for the remaining Teaching Talks and Teaching Tech Talks for the fall semester: http://www.bu.edu/ceit/faculty-development/teaching-talks/
The full schedule is available after the jump.
Online training on Microsoft products
Ever wondered about additional features in Word or PowerPoint but weren’t sure where to turn? Online training about Microsoft products is available to all BU faculty and staff. Learn more about this training at www.bu.edu/tech/training/online/microsoft/
Teaching Tech Talks begin next week!
Welcome back to BU! The fall semester is in full swing, and we are working in many ways to help you with technology in your teaching. We have partnered with the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching on their newly expanded list of Teaching Talks, which are now each paired with a Teaching Tech Talk. These seminars are excellent places to think about enhancing your teaching and the role can technology can play in the process. We will kick off the series on September 18. CEIT will present a Teaching Talk by Domenic Screnci at 10:30 on instructional design, followed by a Teaching Tech Talk at noon introducing new technologies and our educational technology team. This will be a great opportunity to discover new technologies you might not have known about, and think about how they can make your teaching more effective. You can register for this talk and others now. You can also see a complete list of our packed schedule of Teaching Talks and Teaching Tech Talks for the fall.
Portfolio about portfolios
If you’re curious about ePortfolios and would like to learn more about the uses they can have in your classrooms, or you’d just like to get some hands-on tips about how to put them together, then check out our brand-new resource: the portfolio about portfolios. This site is an ePortfolio just like the ones you can create, but full of helpful information about why ePortfolios can help your classes and how you can put portfolios together. It also includes detailed help on the Digication system’s newer and more advanced features, like the Organizer and Courses. Have a look!
Blackboard Learn Pilot is Underway
In collaboration with the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching, IS&T is happy to announce the faculty have been selected for the Blackboard Learn pilot. There are 21 faculty across the schools and colleges and about 35 courses. These courses all include undergraduate and graduate courses and large (largest at 900) and small class sizes (smallest at 10). There is a great collection of teaching styles that the steering committee feels will be representative of BU as a whole.
There is still a lot to do but we know this pilot will help shape our new learning management system. We will gradually phase out Blackboard 8 to make way for the new and improved Blackboard Learn.
You can expect to see updates and workshops on the project coming from CEIT over the next few months.
Welcome to the Educational Technology Blog!
Welcome to the Educational Technology Blog, a showcase for faculty technology innovations across Boston University’s campuses. Here, you can expect to find both announcements about up-and-coming technologies at BU, and case studies of new and exciting ways that faculty around BU are using technology to further their teaching and research goals.
Posts on this blog will be placed into categories according to both the specific technology or software package (such as Blackboard) and the broader genre or style of educational technology that it is a part of (such as learning management systems). On the right, you’ll see a list of all the genres and technologies we’ve posted on so far, and the schools where they’re used. Feel free to click these and explore what you’re interested in. We’re just starting, so there aren’t many yet – but you’ll see more soon!
This blog is set up using blogs.bu.edu, a service that makes WordPress blogs available to all members of the BU community – you can start a blog yourself just like this one.
