There are a variety of options available if you would like to incorporate audio into your online course:

1) Built in audio components within Blackboard (Wimba Voice Tools).

If you are using Blackboard maybe you are already familiar with some of these tools, if not take a minute to check them out because they are very easy to use and extremely useful.

• Voice Authoring: to easily record and add audio file(s) to post for students
• Voice Email: to record audio file to be sent via email through Blackboard
• Voice Board: to create an audio enhanced discussion board
• Voice Presentation: to create an audio presentation
• Wimba Podcaster: to create an audio podcast directly within Blackboard

All of these audio options can be located from the drop down menu within a content area (Assignments for example). Record directly into the Blackboard system, all you need is a functioning microphone, and your students will hear the audio presented through the easy to use user interface tools within Blackboard and the given voice tool.

2) Record, edit and produce audio files independently from Blackboard (Audacity).

There are a large number of options available to work with audio. At the ITL we recommend a software called Audacity. It is a free download and allows one to record, import, edit and export necessary audio files which can be burned to CD/DVD, emailed to interested parties and even uploaded to a web server (including Blackboard).

The one important piece of information regarding Audacity is to know about the third party plug-in which allows you to export MP3 files. Without this plug-in you will only be able to export .wav files etc. and not the standard MP3 format which reduces file size dramatically. From the download page provided below, download and install the necessary version of software based on your operating system, but also note the "LAME MP3 encoder" which is required to export MP3 files. You can place this file anywhere you like (I typically place it in the software program file) just remember where it is so you can tell the Audacity where to locate the file later (this is only a 1 time chore).

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download

Having your PowerPoint presentations packaged right along with other lesson materials, simple student assessment activities, and so forth can be very useful.  SoftChalk LessonBuilder lets you do this very easily.

Importing Your PowerPoint Slides into the SoftChalk Slide Show

There are several ways to bring the content from your PowerPoint files into a SoftChalk lesson. One way is to import the slides into the SoftChalk Slide Show.
 
If you have PowerPoint 2007, you can do the following:
 
1.       Within PowerPoint 2007, open a presentation. 

2.       Choose Save As.

3.       At the bottom of the window for the Save as type, select JPEG (*.jpg). 

4.       Click Save.

5.       At the next window asking what to export, click Every Slide.

6.       A folder will be created with each slide appearing as an image.

7.       Quit PowerPoint.

8.       Start LessonBuilder.

9.       Choose Insert/Activity/Slide Show.

10.     Click Select Folder.

11.     Select the folder with the slide images you created earlier. Click Open.

12.     Click OK to close the Slideshow Activity window. 

What is OpenOffice?
OpenOffice is a good office suite (available as a free download at www.openoffice.org) that can do most of what is offered in Microsoft Office.  OpenOffice equivalent components to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Access are OpenOffice Writer, Impress, Calc and Base. (OpenOffice does not have an Outlook equivalent).

Microsoft Office and OpenOffice Differences
Newer features of Microsoft Office, particularly, multimedia-related features, spiffier templates, presentation transitions, document themes, and the like are the sorts of things OpenOffice lacks, but most people don't use those or will not miss them. 

One Microsoft Office feature missing in OpenOffice that some instructors will miss is the ability for creating narrated presentations; that is, lecture presentations synchronized with voice narration, which add significant value over lecture presentations without voice.

On the other hand, OpenOffice HTML Export produces nice HTML, Web accessible HTML, built-in.  For Microsoft Office, one needs to install the Illinois Web Accessibility Wizard for Microsoft Office, a free Microsoft Office add-on available to the UIC community at the university Web store - http://webstore.illinois.edu.

Also, since smartphones like the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Palm devices do not have (today) built-in support for viewing OpenOffice document file formats, it is recommended to save OpenOffice documents in Microsoft Office file formats so they can be opened on smartphones.

The biggest difference, of course, is that OpenOffice is free, whereas Microsoft office costs money. 

Campus units can purchase Microsoft Office from the Urbana General Stores, under the Microsoft Select program.  Microsoft Office 2007 Standard Edition (Outlook, Word, Excel & PowerPoint) costs $45, whereas Microsoft Office 2007 Professional (MS-Office 2007 Standard Edition plus Access and Publisher) costs $55.  Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is also $45.  Microsoft OneNote is $9.99.

Trying out OpenOffice
In general, most people who voluntarily want to play with or start using OpenOffice will do fine with it, especially, if they have access to Microsoft Office in case they run into compatibility or functionality issues.

Lynda.com, available to everyone at UIC, has several three-hour long self-service online tutorials on each of the OpenOffice components; for Lynda.com on-campus and off-campus access links for anyone at UIC, visit:  www.accc.uic.edu/training.html.

Students can subscribe to a Blackboard discussion forum and/or thread. This would result in them receiving either a link to a discussion forum and/or thread post or the body of the new post in their email. The reason you might want to enable subscription for students when you create a discussion forum and/or thread is to simply provide students with the option of receiving email notices when new stuff is posted to Blackboard. In other words, students wouldn’t need to go to their Blackboard course site to see if anything new has been posted to a discussion forum. To enable the subscribe feature in a forum or thread, here’s all you need to do:

1. Go to Control Panel -> Discussion Board and then click your course discussion board (the same name as your course) to open it.
2. Click the +Forum button at the top left of the window to create a new discussion forum.
3. You will then need to name your discussion forum and decide upon how you want it to look and behave for your students. One of the choices is 'Subscribe'

By default, Blackboard has the “Do not allow subscriptions” radio box selected. However, you can choose between the following:

1. Allow members to subscribe to threads
2. Allow members to subscribe to forum (with the additional options of (a) include body of post in the email or (b) include link to post.

If you select “Allow members to subscribe to threads,” then any threads in that post will have a little button at the top right of the discussion thread view that says “Subscribe.” When the student clicks this button, they are automatically subscribed to that thread, with any new posts being sent to their email. If you select the second choice, “Allow members to subscribe to forum,” then that forum will have the “Subscribe” button for the student to select and all new postings to that forum would either be (a) posted in its entirety to the students’ email or (b) posted as a link (less text in the student’s email message, since it would just be a link to the discussion forum.)

Students who have officially dropped a class ...and... who are no longer listed on the official student class rosters of the UofI Banner student information system should no longer be re-enrolled/added to Blackboard course sites after the UIC add/drop period ends.

(Add a couple of days for the last adds and drops to make it through the systems)

Please double-check that the student in question has officially dropped the class by looking at the official Banner class rosters -- the ITL has a link to UIC Class Rosters on the top right of the ITL home page (www.accc.uic.edu/itl) under the blue tab labeled "UIC in Session!".

The last day to add/drop classes at UIC is the 10th day of instruction (last Friday 9/4 for this fall 2009 term).

I would imagine that by now (a week later) if you make a student unavailable or otherwise un-enroll/remove a student from your class because he/she has dropped the class, such a student should no longer be re-enrolled/added again automatically.

*** Be very careful when removing students from Blackboard course sites because doing so effectively deletes the students grades and any record of activities that the student did in the Blackboard course site. When one removes a student, Blackboard posts a warning message and asks that you type "Yes" just to make sure that removing students and erasing all their associated data is what you really want to do.

It is in fact better and recommended that instead of removing the students you make them unavailable for your course, preserving their student data.

To make a student unavailable for your course:

1. Click on the “Control Panel”
2. Click on “List/Modify Users” located under “User Management”
3. Search for the user’s name either by last name, user name (UIC NetId), or email and click “Search”
4. Click on the “Properties” button next to the user’s name.
5. Under “#4 Role and Availability” select “No” located under “Available (this course only)” and click “Submit”

Making the student unavailable is very useful because if you ever need to give the student access to the course in the future, all you have to do is follow the directions given above and change “No” back to “Yes” and everything associated with the student will still be available.

Our Oracle database was recently upgraded to a newer version, more secure, more reliable and much faster, also now correcting a bug which prevented creating empty forums/threads/posts.

The Campus Pack was recently upgraded to version 3, which fixed the current (and future) year setting, along with some useful improvements according to the official Learning Objects release notes.

The quiz timer bug was fixed last week for those that were using Internet Explorer 8 while taking quizzes in Blackboard. IE 8 will still remain not supported until we upgrade to Blackboard Learn 9.

With the addition of the Flash Media Server (FMS) we've been working on making the process simpler for people to use.  First step was to make it easier for people to upload content on the server.  We synced up a directory on WebDisk labeled "Streaming" to be paired off with a directory on the FMS.  That way people wouldn't need to use an FTP program to load their content on the server.  It also gives better control of who can modify the content in a particular directory.

We are currently working on creating a flash video player to playback a flv file (flash video file) on FMS.  Typically a user has to use Flash CS4 Pro to created the swf file that plays back the flash video.  We've been working on making a general use swf file that anyone can use by just specify the flv file in the HTML code parameters.

Here is a sample of what we've developed so far:

In the next week or two we will have a working version and will make it readily available for people at UIC to use.

The ACCC Instructional Technology Lab (ITL) is offering a number of Blackboard introductory and advanced training sessions for faculty and teaching staff, through the end of Week 4.

 Advanced topics include using Web 2.0 tools for online student activities and delivering multimedia-rich educational content for traditional on-campus classes as well as blended and online learning.

 To attend any of these sessions, simply email the ITL (at itl@uic.edu) indicating the session that you will be attending (session title, date and time).  All sessions are being held on the East campus, at the ITL-East, located on the first floor of the Richard J. Daley Library in room LIB 1-310, south wing, facing SEO.

 The following session schedule is also listed on the top right of the ITL home page (www.accc.uic.edu/itl), under ITL News:

 Week 2 :: Week of Monday, August 31

• Monday 8/31  1-2pm  East campus, ITL-East -  Intro to Blackboard
• Monday 8/31  2-3pm  East campus, ITL-East -  Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
  
  
• Tuesday 9/1  1-2pm  East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
•  Tuesday 9/1  2-3pm  East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
  
  
•  Wednesday 9/2 1-2pm East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
•  Wednesday 9/2 2-3pm East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
  
  
•  Thursday 9/3  1-2pm East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
•  Thursday 9/3  2-3pm East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
  

Week 3  :: Week of Tuesday, September 8

• Tuesday 9/8  1-2pm East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
• Tuesday 9/8  2-3pm East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
  
  
• Wednesday 9/9  1-2pm East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
• Wednesday 9/9  2-3pm East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
  
  
• Thursday 9/10  1-2pm East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
• Thursday 9/10  2-3pm East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
• Thursday 9/10  3-4pm East campus, ITL-East - Online Activities: SoftChalk LessonBuilder
  

Week 4 :: Week of Monday, September 14

• Monday 9/14  1-2pm East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
• Monday 9/14  2-3pm East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
  
  
• Tuesday 9/15 1-2pm East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
• Tuesday 9/15 2-3pm East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
  
  
• Wednesday 9/16 1-2pm East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
• Wednesday 9/16 2-3pm East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
  
  
• Thursday 9/17 1-2pm East campus, ITL-East - Intro to Blackboard
• Thursday 9/17 2-3pm East campus, ITL-East - Teaching with Blackboard: Advanced Topics
• Thursday 9/17 3-4pm East campus, ITL-East - Online Activities: SoftChalk LessonBuilder

The ACCC Instructional Technology Lab (ITL) is available to UIC faculty and staff either by appointment or without an appointment during ITL-East and ITL-West Walk-in Hours:

• ITL-East (East campus) Walk-in Hours -  Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, from 1-5pm
  The ITL-East is on the East campus, on the first floor of the Richard J. Daley Library (Room LIB 1-310), south wing, directly facing SEO.

• The ITL-West (West campus) Walk-in Hours - Thursdays and Mondays from 1-5pm
  The ITL-West in on the West campus at 1940 West Taylor, in Room 181 BGRC, on the first floor of the Benjamin Goldberg Research Center.

The ITL telephone number is 312-996-9824.

If ITL Walk-in Hours days/times don't work for you or if you need some highly specialized assistance, please request an ITL appointment by clicking on Making Reservations at the top left of the ITL home page -- www.accc.uic.edu/itl.

The Instructional Technology Lab and ACCC have a tool that allows you to quickly and easily to create interactive web pages for your e-learning course. It's easy, quick, and your lessons will look like a professional designer created them. You can engage your students with lessons including:

• pop-up text annotations
• self-assessment quizzes
• and interactive learning games
  • cross word
  • drag and drop
  • flash card
  • hot spot
  • labeling
  • ordering
  • photo album
  • seek a word
  • slideshow
  • sorting
  • timeline
    

You can then package your lessons for delivery via your Blackboard course site. Would you like to record the responses from the interactive games and automatically populate your Blackboard Grade Center? You can also do this using SCORM compliant exports and imports. To find our more information please visit our SoftChalk LessonBuilder page at:

www.accc.uic.edu/itl/softchalk.html

With the start of the semester we are seeming some old problems begin to crop up again.  One of them is the issue of Powerpoint lectures converted into an Impatica format. 

Impatica converts a narrated Powerpoint presentation into a streamable Java presentation.  The problem that arises is a result of users updating their version of Java.  When the newer version is installed the Impatica presentations become useless.  A user attempting to view the presentation will only hear audio and no lecture slides.

To get around this problem the instructor needs to get a new version of Impatica and re-impaticize the Powerpoint presentation. 

In the case of an instructor not having a copy of the original we recommend that users instead revert to an older version of Java (Java 1.6.0_07).  To download an older version of Java you can visit the following link older Java version.

Impatica has also documented a solution which you can find on their knowledgebase site.

Update:

Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) upgrade ships only with Java 1.6, which breaks narrated presentations compressed and packaged with Impatica. 

The digital dropbox will be discontinued once we upgrade to Blackboard 9

so you may want to start using the alternative options now instead.

• Option 1) Instead of having students upload files to the digital dropbox you can use the Assignment Manager (or Safe Assignment if you prefer to run papers through a plagiarism database as well). This way you can easily retrieve the digital files through the Grade Center and even grade, indicate errors etc. and re-upload the files for students to download and to view corrections.
  
  
• Option 2) If you are truly looking for a "Digital Dropbox", or file storage repository, you can still create a similar function by using WebDisks and creating a folder for a particular assignment and providing access to the necessary parties (Class A, Registered Users, etc.). For more information please visit: www.accc.uic.edu/itl/webdisks

 Online forum for Teaching & Learning Technology at UIC

 The ACCC Instructional Technology Lab (ITL) is pleased to invite all UIC faculty and teaching staff to stay connected (even during Summer) to discuss, post questions/answers and exchange information on using teaching and learning technology on campus :: what works, what's new, sound pedagogical use of learning technology, help for all computer users (novice to advanced), technology idiosyncrasies, work-arounds, and so forth.

Stay connected, communicate and collaborate with fellow UIC teachers and technologists by joining the ITL Virtual Conference social networking site -- login to Blackboard (at http://blackboard.uic.edu with your UIC netid and password), click the Courses tab, search for ITL Virtual Conference and click the Enroll button next to it.

Once enrolled, the ITL Virtual Conference site will appear on your myUIC tab everytime you login to Blackboard.  Click on it to access the site, to post questions, answers, read what others have been discussing, and gain access to useful teaching and learning support content, on-demand archives to last week's live Webcasts, miscellaneous links, etc. all stored and kept in one central site for you.

Click the Subscribe icon on any of the discussion boards to get email messages with the text of what is posted and a convenient link to optionally reply back.  That's one way to stay connected; otherwise, login every week (even during Summer) to stay connected, engaged and getting ready for Fall.

As always, if you have any questions, please contact the ACCC Instructional Technology Lab (ITL) at itl@uic.edu or 312-996-9824, ..and follow the ITL on Twitter at www.twitter.com/itl

Collaboration Technology for Teachers & Researchers 
 

Key points to consider

• Asynchronous collaboration tools
• Real-time collaboration tools
• Campus tools vs. off-campus hosted (free) tools

Asynchronous collaboration tools

1.  Listserv lists? – (UIC) ancient but proven email distribution lists
   
   
2.  WebDisks – (UIC) Think of WebDisks as having flash/thumb drives on the Web with granular control for read-only and read-write sharing and saving files and folders with selected people at UIC, with non-UIC folks, with everyone at UIC and/or with the whole Internet at large.  Everyone at UIC has a personal WebDisk.  Additionally, faculty members and departments can get larger WebDisks (starting at 500MB) for teaching, research and other official university activities.
   
   
3. personal and group blogs and wikis (UIC and off-campus hosted)
   Check and subscribe to the RSS feed of the ITL Blog at www.accc.uic.edu/itl/blog
   
   
4. Twitter (off-campus hosted)
   
   
5. Podcasts (MP3 audio recordings), Flash Video streaming (UIC)
   
   
6. Off-campus tools: blogs, wikis, GoogleDocs, Google Sites, Adobe Buzzword
   
   
7. Social networking environments :: Blackboard work sites (UIC), Ning (off-campus hosted)

Real-time collaboration tools

1. MeetMe telephone conferencing (UIC)
   
   
2. Web conferencing tools: ACCC e-Rooms (aka Centra)(UIC)
   others hosted off-campus: WebEx, Microsoft LiveMeeting, Elluminate
   always consider the convenience of on-demand session archives
   
   
3. Pronto Instant Messenger
   Automatic single sign-on (and seamless integration) with Blackboard course sites and Blackboard work sites, and used outside of Blackboard
   
   
4. Other Instant Messenger tools: Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL, jabber and GoogleTalk
   
   
5. Video conferencing
   like Polycom video conferencing systems, supported at UIC 
   H.323 standards-compliant standard definition and high-definition

What is Twitter? 

Twitter is a simple social networking tool that lets you post and/or read other people's posts. Twitter posts are called tweets and can be at most 140 characters long.  Your tweets aggregate (publicly) on your Twitter profile and are sent to other people who have chosen to follow you. 

When you login to Twitter, Twitter shows you a list of all the tweets of the people that you follow.  I, for example, follow a number of colleagues (around the world), news blurbs like UICnews, CNN and the Wall Street Journal, and various Twitter streams from vendors, special interest groups, other publications, and so forth.

A great Twitter feature is that you can selectively tell Twitter to send you the tweets from certain people or Twitter streams that you follow to your cell phone, as text messages (via SMS).  You can also post your tweets, reply to tweets or send private (direct) tweets from your cell, via SMS. Typically, I tweet from my cell, I let just a few tweets from others hit my cell (I usually read those instantly). Then, several times a day, I check the whole aggregation of tweets from everyone I follow on the Web or via various cool Twitter apps available for personal computers and smartphones.

Besides the obvious modern communication (distraction) panacea, Twitter can and is used every day for an endless assortment of applications, from instant Q&A and alarm clocks to beaming yourself into meetings and Webcasts, or getting instant foreign language translation help from abroad.

Try it out today at www.twitter.com ...or look at www.twitter.com/itl :: www.twitter.com/uicnews :: www.twitter.com/cnn :: www.twitter.com/oprah

If you have any questions or need help, contact the ITL at itl@uic.edu, 312-996-9824 or... (dare I say) tweet us at @itl ;-)

Enjoy,