Another successful Blackboard Faculty Day was held on September 23rd throughout the day. Over thirty faculty members attended workshops on flipped classrooms, the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program, and Blackboard Portfolios. The session that got the most attention was on Flipped Classrooms. Here’s a recap of what  was covered.

The ideal flipped classroom is student centered and provides opportunities for active learning as well as higher-order thinking. In these classes students do routine learning activities such as watching a video lecture, reading research, or completing knowledge check questions, outside of class. Class time focuses on interactions with experiments, lab work, peer-assisted learning, and demonstrations.

Blackboard Options to Help You Flip Your Classroom

Flipped classrooms have been a hot topic for the last few years, but many professors still don’t know how to take the first steps. Blackboard provides some simple options to help you start the flip.

• Blogs and journals can be used by students to reflect on outside of class activities such as attending workshops or community events. Student blogs can be turned into shared project blogs where everyone in the class contributes what they learn.
• Discussions boards are an easy way to poll students about their understanding of a topic. They can also be used to solicit ideas for in-class discussion or to let the class vote on what topics need to be reviewed in class.
• Tests can be set up to provide specific feedback to students, allowing them to receive immediate remediation.
• Rubrics can be used to show students clear examples of successful work. The rubrics can be set to be shown before or after an assignment is submitted. This allows them to be used as a guideline for students and a grading tool for professors.
• Open Education Resources, such as the Lynda.com courses or materials shared through text book publishers, can add more chances for student practice or different perspectives on research.

Some William & Mary professors have expanded Blackboard’s reach even farther, incorporating social media like Twitter. A few exemplary classes have students contribute two tweets a week that link to a current event or news article. Using the hashtag for the class, the professor can quickly scan the tweets to get a sense of what the students are thinking about.

All of these features can also expand the reach of a traditional course. One of our religion professors holds a virtual test prep session using the Blackboard chat feature. Several of our professors use journals to have students keep a semester-long record of their readings or lab experiments.

If you’re interested in flipping your classroom or expanding the way you use Blackboard, you can always contact bbhelp@wm.edu or contact your Academic Technologist for help at any time!

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Browsing Can Be Difficult Because of the Sheer Number of Videos

That’s a lot of search results for Excel!

Ever feel like watching something on Netflix, spend a half hour browsing through titles, and then decide that now it’s too late to start a movie anyway? (Come on, I know I’m not the only one!) That’s what it can be like browsing through Lynda.com, especially when there’s not a specific topic you’re looking for. Or even if there is: As of this writing, a search for “Excel,” Microsoft’s ubiquitous spreadsheet application, yields 99 course results comprised of 3,828 videos.

The site does offer some ability to cull through the collection by media type, skill level, and duration, and the “courses” page offers a list of “Most Popular Courses.” If you’re looking for a particular skill or set of skills, though, you’re going  to have to do some additional digging.

Using the Playlists Feature to Do Additional Digging

A look at the eLearning kit playlist page put together by W&M’s Ali Briggs.

I think a key to leveraging the availability of Lynda.com is a combination of curating and communicating, making good use of the playlists feature.   Any user can create playlists of tutorials and resources, in essence creating a custom course. A great example is the list of tutorials that Ali Briggs put together for the eLearning Kit resource page which combines vendor-supplied tutorials for Camtasia Studio, YouTube tutorials on Open-Sankore, and Lynda.com’s training course on Microsoft’s OneNote.

Unlike courses or playlists intended for a generalized audience, the list is task-oriented and applicable to a particular activity at William & Mary; in this case, recording annotated lecture videos using the software that comes with our eLearning kit. Her Lynda.com playlist for the kits includes not only technology training videos but also material on instructional design that a user looking for a Camtasia how-to might not even wonder about.

Lynda.com’s Breadth And Depth Is Its Strength

As a professional development resource, Lynda.com’s strength is in the breadth and depth of material available.  Curating playlists targeted to specific groups would go a long way toward making the material relevant to individuals. For example, staff managers who are familiar with the specific training their team members need when they start work could curate playlists that target those topics.

Professors who need students to have certain technology skills to complete coursework — even if those skills are ancillary to the main course topic — can create playlists that address students’ needs. Not to keep harping on Excel, but almost every time I talk to a professor about a class that uses it, the topic of managing the training of a group of students that includes experts, novices, and everything in between comes up; self-directed asynchronous learning on demand is a great solution to this perennial issue.

While it does take work to cull through available videos to create a playlist, efficiency is gained by not forcing every person seeking similar knowledge to go through the same discovery process. Of course, this assumes that the existence of the playlist is communicated to those with need and/or interest — an easy proposition at the class or workgroup level but becoming more difficult and less localized at scale.

If you’ve had successes or challenges with these kinds of resources, share your experience in the comments section below.

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My Rocky IV GIF showing Drago and Rocky’s different punching training regimens. Don’t worry, you’ll get to see it again at the end of this post!

Why Make a GIF with Video?

If you’re making a GIF with only a few images, and they’re from different sources or different camera angles, then you should probably go ahead and make it using still images, rather than video. But, if you’re trying to produce an animated effect with your GIF and you have access to a video that you want to GIF-ify, then you should use software that makes a GIF from video.

Video-based GIFs can include dozens or hundreds of frames, and using software collects images more evenly than if you try to do screen captures yourself. Trust me, the first GIF I tried to make that way turned out looking like bad stop-motion animation. Plus, if you use an application to do this, it takes a lot less effort on your part to create your GIF.

And, you can always go into your final GIF and manually edit the frames yourself, if you want to make changes. Good deal!

Where Do I Get the Video for My GIF?

Good question! The most important thing that you need is a video clip. It doesn’t have to be the exact clip that you want your GIF based on, since GIF Brewery lets you select the start and end point for your GIF. You can grab a clip from a number of places, but remember that in the end it will have to be a digital video file (most likely candidates are Quicktime Movies (.mov), MPEG-4 (.mp4 or .m4v), MPEG-2, MPEG-1, and AVI). I usually end up working with .mp4s. Here are some possible video sources:

• Your own digital video camera, like your smartphone’s camera, or a digital camcorder, or a webcam.
• A digital file grabbed from a DVD or Blu-Ray. (Remember though that Blu-Rays are more complicated to use with computers, since they are not considered compatible. But, it can be done!) To get this, you’ll need an application that can create a clip from a DVD or Blu-Ray. I use Handbrake with my Macbook.
• A YouTube clip (or Vimeo or other streaming video). You can often download streaming video to your hard drive by using a web app that does this. I’ve used KeepVid and others found by Google — all you need is a URL for your video. This doesn’t work with every streaming video, however, and does not produce the most high-quality video, but usually it’s good enough for GIF work.
• A screen-captured clip. To use this, you’ll need a screen capture application, like Jing or Screencast-O-Matic. GIF Brewery’s new version has a built-in video screen capture capability, so that will make creating GIFs from screen-captured video that much easier. The new version is coming out soon-ish, and it will be free for the first week that it’s up on the App Store.
• Any other digital video file you might have lying around on your hard drive, as long as it’s a common file type, like an .mp4, .mov, or .avi.

In terms of using any of the above sources for video clips, the good thing about GIFs is that you don’t need a long clip. In fact, most GIFs work the best when they are taken from 10 seconds or less of video. So this means just taking a tiny snippet of a video, which won’t take up too much hard drive space, nor will it take too much processing power to work with.

Other Than a Source Video, What Else Do I Need?

You’ll also need the software for creating a GIF from video. As I outlined in my previous post about making GIFs, if you’re lucky enough to have access to Adobe Photoshop (which you should, if you’re a W&M person — just stop in the Swem Media Center), you can use it to make a GIF from video or still images.

Photoshop is unwieldy and can be a little hard to get the hang of, and all you need from it is one tiny chunk of what it’s able to do with image manipulation. So, I recommend getting a stand-alone application designed specifically for making GIFs. As I’ve said before, I use GIF Brewery and have liked how user-friendly it is.

Let’s Make a GIF!

Using GIF Brewery is quite straightforward and easy to use. I’ve chosen a clip from Rocky IV (1985) to make a GIF from. This is the Rocky movie where Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) fights Soviet boxer Captain Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) and the movie is not too subtly about the cold war. The clip I’m using is the training montage scene towards the end, where Rocky is in the Soviet Union to train for his fight with Drago, and the entire montage scene has many cuts between Rocky and Drago’s training regimens, set to some uplifting training music.

Depending on where you get your source video from, you might open a clip to have it be a ginormous window. Using the “Resize” option with GIF Brewery will help you get around that, plus it will make your GIF take up much less hard drive space in the end. I usually aim for GIFs to be less than 2 MB, and so for the size, I choose a size between 400 and 500 pixels wide. If the clip that you want to make a GIF from is particularly long, you may want to change the size to be on the smaller side, since a longer clip means more total frames, and therefore a bigger file.

My GIF Brewery window, with my clip pulled up. I’ve already resized it to 400 pixels wide, by using the “Resize” button in the upper left of the window.

I’ve pulled up the clip in GIF Brewery, and it’s about three and a half minutes long, which is way too long to make an entire GIF from. So, I’ll have to choose where I want my GIF to start and end.

Once you find your starting place, you can click on the “-” or “+” to incrementally move through your clip, so you can select exactly the right moment that you want. I’ve chosen to make a GIF of a juxtaposition between Drago using a high tech arm machine and Rocky using an old-fashioned speed bag. This portion is very short, so I’ve made sure to make my start point right when the cut happens to Drago on the arm machine:

I’ve found my start point, and then clicked “Set Start,” which moves the little yellow arrow to where location on the clip is. Look at the quite unsubtle red light on the Drago shot. Do you think that maybe it’s red because he’s a communist?

Now, I’ll need to do the same for my end point. I’ve decided to keep the clip a little bit long, just too see what that looks like, because there are several cuts between Drago and Rocky before the next portion of the montage, which involves Rocky sawing a giant log with a giant saw:

Nice saw, Rocky, but I think we’ll save it for another GIF.

I don’t want the part with the saw, though, since I just want the bit with the arm machine and speed bag, so I’ve moved my clip to right before the cut to the saw:

I’ve decided to end my clip here, which is right before a cut to Rocky sawing a giant log. I’ve found the spot on the clip, and then clicked “Set End,” which moves the red arrow to the end point.

Now I’m all ready to start making the actual GIF! You can see in the bottom right corner of the GIF Brewery window a number for “Clip Duration,” which tells you how long your selection of the entire video file is. This one is 5.17 seconds, which will make for a nice GIF, I think.

Clicking on the “GIF Properties” button opens up a smaller window with all of my GIF settings:

My GIF Properties — these are the options for my GIF that will determine how fast it is, what the quality of the individual images is like, and how many frames per second.

The first two options, Frame Count and Frame Delay are for the entire GIF. The Frame Count is how many images (or frames) you would like your GIF to be, and the Frame Delay is the number of milliseconds you want each image to stay before being replaced with the next.

Now, remember that this clip is originally 5.17 seconds long, which means that if we use the default options of 24 frames with a 100 ms delay, we’ll have a clip that is 2400 ms or 2.4 seconds long. This will speed up our clip to about twice its original speed. I don’t want that — for this GIF, I want to keep the same relative speed of the original clip. That’s where the next option comes in, “Automatically Calculate Count & Delay.” If you check this box, all you have to do is choose the number of frames per second you would like your GIF to be, and GIF Brewery will make your GIF the same number of seconds as your original clip, but with your chosen number of frames per second. This means that the GIF will be the same speed as the original clip.

So, I’ll check that box, because I want my GIF to be the same speed. The default number of frames is set to ten, and for a 5.17 second clip, that will mean 51 images in my GIF. That’s okay, but I know that there are a lot of fast cuts in the 5.17 second clip I’ve chosen, so I’m going to change it to twelve frames per second, just to make sure to catch enough of each cut. I’ll see how that looks, and I may choose to add even more frames per second.

Next, is the Looping Mode — you can choose your GIF to “play” in normal mode, reverse, or palindrome. I’m going to leave mine on normal because I want the GIF to play in the same way as the original clip. “Reverse” will play your GIF in reverse, and palindrome will have it play forward then backward. Selecting palindrome will also double the number of images in your GIF, so keep that in mind.

You can also choose a custom delay for the final frame, if you want your GIF to pause on the last frame. I sometimes do this, but I won’t use it for this one, since the final frame isn’t very interesting. The last option in the GIF Properties window has to do with processing the images from the video clip in a way that will make the GIF take up less hard drive space. I usually choose to do this, and pick Adaptive Palette, as it makes the GIF look pretty good even though I’m changing it to have fewer colors. You can also have less or more colors than 48, so you can experiment with that if you like!

So, we’re ready to take a crack at this GIF! Click “Create GIF” and watch the magic happen! A progress window will appear, then, if all goes right, in a few seconds a new window will open with a preview of your GIF:

The preview for my GIF! Aw, it looks so nice!

You can choose to discard or save it. This makes it easy to try out different properties till you figure out what you want — you can just discard a GIF, make changes, then create the GIF again. The number in the upper left corner of the window tells you how big your GIF is — this one is 1.38 MB, which is okay with me.

I like how this GIF turned out, so I think I’ll keep it. I’ve saved it, and now I have my very own GIF, ready to share with students! Here it is:

My Rocky IV GIF showing Drago and Rocky’s different punching training regimens.

So, now you should be all ready to go and make your own GIFs. You can also add captions and do other kinds of overlays, but for now, let’s keep it simple like Rocky’s training!

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Today’s Learner and the New Learning Experience

This year’s conference focused on today’s learner and the new learning experience. According to Blackboard, the new learning experience is a “transformative way to create better engagement, interaction and quality learning through integrated technology services and data capabilities.” Blackboard hosted several panels that discussed the need for change in education to better support today’s learners. The company also demoed the new “Ultra” experience – a modern interface and workflow to Blackboard Learn with the promise to evolve as quickly as today’s learners.

A variety of sessions were offered, with different focus areas making it possible for Rachel, Kari, and I to attend sessions specific to our individual roles at W&M. I attended eleven sessions with the goal of learning more about accessibility, approaches to online course design within Blackboard, and the ways other institutions prepare and support faculty who teach online. My expectations were met, making for a worthwhile experience, and I would like to share tips I learned about designing accessible courses from my favorite session at the conference.

Accessible Course Design

Accessibility was a hot topic at BbWorld 2015. There were at least three sessions about making your courses and materials accessible, both in and out of Blackboard. My favorite session was “Increasing Student Engagement: Best Practices for Accessible Course Design” presented by a team from the University of Montana. Instructional Designer Marlene Zentz and Student Accessibility Specialist Aaron Page displayed two screens, one showing the default view of a Blackboard course and another showing the same Blackboard course from the perspective of a student using accessibility software.

They discussed how to design a course that will work with high contrast settings, a magnifier, and a screen reader — settings and software typically used by students who are blind or visually impaired (abbreviated BVI). Zentz covered heading structure, text formatting, self-describing links, alt text for images and graphics, lists, and tables. Page is blind, and demonstrated how he navigates through a Blackboard course using a screen reader and explained how the modifications Zentz made to the course improved his access to information.

Heading Structure

Heading structure is important because it helps students using screen readers quickly navigate to a section on a website. Simply bolding, underling, or enlarging a piece of text does not make it recognizable as a header to a screen reader. You must change the text to a heading within the text formatting tool bar. There are six levels of headers used internationally: H1-H6. Blackboard automatically creates these header levels for you as you build a course, except for when you create a body of text that contains multiple sections.

For example, I may want to type a syllabus directly into Blackboard by creating an ‘Item’ in a content area. I should make the text of each section of my syllabus a ‘Heading’ so that a student using a screen reader can quickly navigate to a specific section rather than having to listen to the entire syllabus each time they visit that page.

To format text as a heading in Blackboard:

1. When creating or editing an item, highlight the text you want to convert into a heading
2. Using the content editor, select ‘Heading’ from the ‘Format’ drop-down menu
3. Click on the ‘Submit’ button to save your changes
   

   Making a heading in Blackboard.

Text Formatting

Using bold, italics, or different colored text is meaningless to a screen reader. Avoid using text formatting as the only way to communicate information. Page suggested using an asterisk to convey meaning, and defining the meaning of the asterisk at the top of a page rather than the bottom so the student knows what it means from the start. The screen reader will say “asterisk” as it reads the page ensuring all of your students receive the same information.

Example: *Indicates take-home test; class does not meet

Self-Describing Links

When inserting a hyperlink into a body of text, be sure it describes the website. Students who use a screen reader often tab from link to link. The student may miss important information if the links says “click here” or is a long URL.

• Do this: Academic Technology Blog (self-explanatory, student knows what to expect)
• Not this: Click here (student does not know what to expect)
• Not this: http://at.blogs.wm.edu/ (screen reader will read each individual character to student; time consuming and uninformative)

To create a self-describing link in Blackboard:

1. When creating or editing an item, highlight the text you want to convert into a hyperlink (make sure it describes the website)
2. Select the ‘Insert/Edit Link’ icon in the content editor
3. Browse to a file or paste a link into the ‘Link Path’ field
4. Select a ‘Target’ from the drop-down menu
5. Click on the ‘Insert’ button
6. Click on the ‘Submit’ button to save your changes

Creating a self-describing link in Blackboard, step 1.

Creating a self-describing link in Blackboard step 3.

In regards to choosing a link ‘Target’ in step 4, I usually select ‘Open in New Window’ for files and external websites so students don’t have to navigate back to Blackboard when they close the file or external website (the course will remain open in another window after they click on the link). If the link takes the student to another section in the same Blackboard course then I usually select ‘Open in This Window/Frame.’ Zentz suggested stating how you insert external links into Blackboard in your syllabus so students know what to expect when navigating your course. This will help students who are using screen readers.

Alt Text for Images and Graphics

Images and graphics are meaningless to a screen reader unless you include alt text. If you embed an image into an item or test question in Blackboard, be sure to include alt text. Alt text is a description of the image or graphic. The description should provide equivalent information to students who cannot see it. I learned from Zentz that alt text isn’t necessary for visual styling, such as header images or icons that are not content related.

Alt text isn’t necessary for visual styling graphics

To insert an image with alt text in Blackboard:

1. When creating or editing an item, select the ‘Insert/Edit Image’ icon in the content editor
2. Locate an image by browsing your computer or content collection
3. Enter an image description in the ‘Image Description’ field (this is your alt text)
4. Click on the ‘Insert’ button
5. Click on the ‘Submit’ button to save your changes

Inserting an image with alt text in Blackboard, step 1.

Inserting an image with alt text in Blackboard, step 3.

Lists and Tables

Avoid pasting lists directly into a Blackboard text box. Instead, create bullet, numbered, or lettered lists using the ‘Bullet List’ or ‘Numbered List’ icons in the content editor. The screen reader will say the number, letter, or “bullet” and then read the corresponding text.

Tables are difficult to navigate using a screen reader. Be sure to label the table and include a description below the table.

Inserting lists and tables in Blackboard using the content editor.

More Information

These simple tricks increase the accessibility of your course ensuring all students receive equivalent information and can navigate your course with ease. For more information on Blackboard’s accessibility features, check out Rachel Kleinsorge’s post on Accommodating Different Needs in Blackboard. You can also visit the Accessibility Features section of Blackboard Help for tips on accessible course design. Please contact BbHelp@wm.edu for Blackboard assistance.

Student Accessibility Services at W&M provides a variety of services to students with disabilities. Please contact them if you have any questions about accessibility.

The post Blackboard Accessibility Tips: Designing Courses for Students Using Screen Readers appeared first on Academic Technology.

The Information and Technology Convergence Center, a Strategic New Space for the University

Our hosts were three members of the DTLT: Jim – of course – and colleagues Martha Burtis, Director of the Digital Knowledge Center (DKC) and Andy Rush, Coordinator of Academic Media Production. All were incredibly generous with their time, especially given that they’ve been running so many tours in recent months to showcase their very new home in the Information and Technology Convergence Center (ITCC).

This building is a strategic new space for the university, encapsulated by an emphasis upon the “and” in its title. This is not an IT building. Rather, this is a building for students to run, use, and engage with digital technologies in all their forms. An academic technology commons.  In addition to housing the DTLT offices there are a few well-equipped classrooms, dynamic meetings spaces, audio and visual recording studios, an exhibition space, and an impressively versatile auditorium. We were looking forward to not just seeing this new space and hearing about how it has been used in its first year, but also how the DTLT team has come to be known as one the most innovative academic technology groups in the country.

The Console Houses New and Old Technological Items of Popular Culture

We found Jim tidying up the coffee table on the 4th floor in the UMW Console, and so our tour started there. The console is a curious space, pushing us back to the late 1970s and early 1980s by surrounding us with popular culture aesthetics of the time: wood paneling, a Back to the Future poster, Phil Collins cassettes, and so on. It’s ultimately an exploration of the cultural impacts of technology through aesthetics.

April and I jumped to the sofa for a quick game of Donkey Kong on the Atari, then chatted with Jim over the foosball table. He explained how a faculty friend of the department was working on getting Youtube clips of entire days’ worth of 1980s television broadcasts to be transmitted to several cathode-ray tubes around the room. We flipped through titles like War Games and Flashdance that were in a bizarre Videodisc format, something akin to an enormous floppy disc.

The construction of this project space is not tied to any particular course, program, or initiative at UMW, but is emblematic of the kind of vibe running around the DTLT. The UMW Console was born out of the interest, enthusiasm, and curiosity of the people who got involved. It has turned into a highly productive and intriguing exploration of technologies new and old, taking on a life of its own: apparently people drop vintage items off all the time, unsolicited. When I asked Jim how he did it, he lightly struggled to scan his memory, shrugged, and said, “we just started building it.”

Next Stop: the Digital Knowledge Center

We next met up with Martha and Andy, and they all escorted us into Martha’s most recent undertaking, the new Digital Knowledge Center. The DKC is a place where students can go for help with digital projects across curricula at UMW. It is staffed by other UMW students who serve as peer tutors, thus it also offers up employment opportunities for students. Brilliantly, the work at the DKC ultimately supports the DTLT work with faculty, as now instructors have a place to send students for support in more complex digital projects.  It’s a space aimed at accomplishing what our Swem Library’s Writing Center does, but is focused on digital, academic projects.

Andy, Martha, peer tutor Callie, Jim, John, Pablo, and April in the DKC, with the DTLT offices just beyond on the right.

The mere notion of this kind of program and the thinking behind it was enough to raise all of our eyebrows. Directly supporting teaching and learning that is more deeply engaged with digital, “twenty-first century” tools should be a top priority in all post-secondary institutions. It seems that with the DKC, the DTLT has come up with compelling approach to actually support that work.

It’s More Than Just New Facilities That Make Up This Space

The tour continued and we covered the rest of the building, which really has all of the allure and exciting potential of any new facility. But bright, shiny surfaces aside, this group has been up to great things for a longer stretch than that of this fresh space. In fact, one of the queries I had gone to Fredericksburg with was trying to understand how a small department at a small public university has become such a powerhouse in innovative edtech. After all, this isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the work going on up there, and I even examined some the division’s strategic planning efforts in my doctoral coursework.

We ran out of time to have an in-depth discussion on this topic, but there were several allusions to strong leadership early on in the division’s existence as well as regular support from upper administration. These are important for sure and should not be underestimated. Yet, after spending time with this portion of the group, methinks they were being much too humble. Just a few weeks after our visit, Jim reflected on the paradoxical success of the DTLT and its simultaneous disbanding. He states it much more eloquently, but basically: It’s the people. It is the contributions and collaborations of those people that have worked for, in, and with the DTLT that made it what it is and have created such a sublime edtech exemplar.

The circuitous unfolding of a project like the Console and polished brilliance of the DKC are but two examples of the uncanny work coming from these people in Fredericksburg. Their open willingness (and effectiveness in doing so) to share their work both in and out their institution are testament to their vigilance in making edtech better for teachers and learners.

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How to Find Blackboard Help

Our default course shell includes a link to the Blackboard help at the bottom of the course navigation. Research from Blackboard has found that many people don’t know what Blackboard product or version they’re using.

Here at W&M, clicking on the help link takes you to the Blackboard help site for our version of Blackboard. The link goes directly to the “Student” page, so professors will need to use the drop down box in the upper right to select “Instructor.”

The Redesign Streamlines Your Questions

The Blackboard help site redesign has been carefully planned to insure that all bookmarks and links from the old system will still work when the redesign is complete. If you’ve saved the link to the page with the format for uploading test questions or the steps for submitting an assignment, you’ll still find them in the same place.

The new responsive design will be more important for first time users. When they arrive on the main help.blackboard.com page, they will be presented with a few simple questions. Each question appears alone on the screen with a pair of possible answers. The questions sort incoming users and send them to the content they need.

And You’ll Get More Help Finding What You Need

If the questions do you lead to the wrong place, Blackboard has created simple descriptions of each Blackboard product. The descriptions, example images, and short videos of each product will help you find the right set of help pages. From there users can search for key terms or browse through a table of contents.

The Blackboard Help pages are designed for Blackboard users from around the world. Help pages are available in twenty-six different languages from Arabic to Vietnamese. Students who are more comfortable learning about Blackboard in their native language should start on those pages — the content is the same!

Login and Password Questions

The most common question that sends people to the Blackboard help page is “What’s my password?” or “How do I log on?” Here at W&M your Blackboard password is your main W&M password. The log on information you use to access your Banner account will get you into Blackboard. If you reset your Banner or W&M network password, you’ll need to use that new password to get into Blackboard. The exception to this rule is the non William & Mary user accounts. Those accounts are established by someone at W&M for a user outside of our system. Their passwords are only maintained in the Blackboard system.

Regardless of your password type, passwords cannot be sent by email. Blackboard password resets must be done over the phone. If you need a new password, call the Technology Support Center,  757-221-4357 (1-HELP).

For more information about the Blackboard help redesign, visit the Redesign information page.

Need Blackboard help? Contact the Blackboard team at bbhelp@wm.edu or by contacting the TSC 757-221-4357 (1-HELP), support@wm.edu.

Want self-service Blackboard help? Try the Blackboard help pages.

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Making a GIF is pretty easy, if you have the right ingredients and the right tools. In this post, I’ll tell you some reasons why you might, as an academic, make a GIF, and also how to make a GIF from still images. In an upcoming post, I’ll show you GIF-making version 2.0, which is making GIFs from video.

I made this GIF from a tiny piece of the training montage in Rocky IV (1985), a late cold war movie if there ever was one. The GIF emphasizes a match-on-action cut that the filmmakers used to compare the mechanized way that the Soviet fighter Drago (Dolph Lundgren) trains with high technology as opposed to Rocky’s (Sylvester Stallone) pioneering American low-tech training methods.

Why Would I Want to Make a GIF?

There are lots of reasons that you might want to make a GIF. The “Academic GIF,” a blog post by Instructional Technologist Jim Groom over on bavatuesdays, has outlined some of those. He’s worked alongside a Chinese history professor at our neighbor the University of Mary Washington to create a “GIFiculum” that has integrated GIF-making into a film class. Take a read over at his blog — he has some really compelling stories about using GIFs in the classroom.

I think that any course that investigates films or other moving images would benefit from some GIF-making. Creating a GIF requires focusing on minutia of the movement of an image, and this required eyeballing of moving image media can help students (or yourself!) notice things that you’d never noticed before. The GIF you create also lets you watch a moment over and over, rather than the way that moments in film usually slip by in their temporally linear fashion. Along those lines, GIFs can also let you slow down or speed up a collection of frames from a moving image source, or give movement to a series of still images. I believe strongly in the power of learning by doing, and making a GIF is easier than, say, video editing, though it can help to develop the same eye for the animated.

From a less cultural critiquing angle, GIFs can be used to make tutorials for students, have students make to explain something to other students. You can add subtitles to them, or make them from a screen capture. On a practical note, GIFs also take up far less hard drive space than a video clip. So, if you want to share something with students or other academic community members, making a GIF of a video can be just the ticket to reduce your file size but still retain the crucial elements of said video. There are lots of reasons why making GIFS is a useful skill for the academic, whether it is a skill to be passed down to students, used for your own research or presentations, or to help you create e-learning materials.

And, as I’ve said above, it’s so easy that there’s really no reason NOT to learn how to do it. Read on for the ingredients and tools needed for GIF making, then I’ll give you a step-by-step tutorial on making a GIF from still images using application GIFfun.

GIF Ingredients

You need one of two “ingredients” to make a GIF. You either need at least two still digital images (like JPEGs or PNGs or what have you), more if you want to use more in your GIF, or you need a video file. Programs that make GIFs will either take frames (i.e. still images) out of a video file and assemble them into a GIF for you, or the program will take still images that you give it, and assemble those into a GIF. I use both methods for making GIFs depending on what I want to use the GIF for.

But where to find these ingredients? With still images, you can get those from all the usual places: your own digital camera, the internet, screen captures (what I usually do), or even scans of analog images that you have laying around. If you can make a JPEG of it, you can make a GIF of it.

With video files, you can get those from anywhere you get a video file from, though arguably these can be a bit harder to nab than still images. But, making a GIF from a video is one of the marvels of modern technology, and well-worth the additional effort to get your hands on a video file. You can grab clips off of a DVD (or, if you’re up to the challenge, a Blu-Ray disc), you can download them from YouTube, you can shoot video with a digital video camera/iPhone.

If you’re planning on using video, make sure that it’s of high quality to start with, because you can always downgrade it but you can’t make it higher quality later. (Despite what criminal procedural shows would lead you to believe with the magic their technicians perform with surveillance camera footage.) This goes double if you are interested in taking a very short clip and making a great number of frames from it, for example if you want to re-create a moment from a film in super slow motion. If you try to do that with a lower quality video clip you’re going to not be very impressed with the results.

GIF Tools

After you’ve got your ingredients, you’ll need your GIF-making tool of choice.  There are a few options:

• A web-based tool, like Make a GIF, will work regardless of whether you have a Mac or PC, and you can make a GIF from a variety of sources, including still images, a YouTube video, a pre-existing GIF, uploading a video file, or a webcam. Phew! That’s a lot of choices! The downside of this is that often web-based GIF making applications will put a watermark on your GIF, or your GIF is housed on their server somewhere. But, if you just want to make one quickly with no fuss, this is the way to go.
• You can use the Adobe suite of software to make a GIF, but since I don’t have a subscription to Adobe’s software, I haven’t tried this method and can’t vouch for it. I do think that it’s a bit overkill, like using a sledge hammer to put up a picture-hanging nail, but if you do have Adobe access, and you want to do some poking around in it to make a GIF, go for it! Here are some instructions [warning: link has an autoplaying video] on using layers in Photoshop to make an animated GIF.
• You can also download a standalone GIF-making application. This is my preferred method. I use GIF Brewery for OS X, I bought it in the App Store for $4.99, and I love it. I use this for making all kinds of GIFs from video. The beta of the upcoming version also allows GIFs based on screen captured video, so there’s nothing that I can’t make a GIF of, if it’s a video. For making a GIF from still images (GIF Brewery doesn’t do that yet), I use GIFfun, a free, no-frills application.

So, now that you have your ingredients and your tools, I’ll show you how I make a GIF with still images! I’m going to use GIFfun for my GIFs, since that’s what I usually use, but the basic principles are the same regardless of your method of choice.

Making a GIF from Still Images

So, I’ve got three NASA images from the first American spacewalk that I want to make into a GIF:

They should all be the same size, and make sure that they are the size that you want the final GIF to be before plonking them into GIFfun. Like I said, GIFfun is no frills, that means no cropping or resizing of your images from inside the application. I use Picasa for all of my cropping and resizing needs.

Open up GIFfun, and you’ll see a “tray” for your image files on the left, and your controls on the right. Go ahead and drag your images into the tray, but do them one at a time. You can also do “Load Folder” in the File menu to bring in multiple image files at a time. Here’s what my window looks like now:

My GIFfun window after putting in my images.

You can move the images around in the tray so that they are in the order that you want them to appear in while your GIF is animating.

Once you have your order set, now you need to know what kind of delay you want for your GIF’s frames. This means how long you want each image to appear before it changes to the next image. GIFfun measures this in 1/100 of a second, and my default is set to 50 (you can change the default in GIFfun’s preferences). This means that my images will change every half of a second. That’s pretty fast for a three-image GIF, so I’ll change it to 100, which means that my image will change every second.

The image delay variable is really up to you, and depends on your GIF and what you’re using it for. Remember that a typical movie runs at 24 frames per second (about .042 seconds per frame), which is a speed that is indistinguishable to the human eye. Most stop-motion animation aims for 12-14 frames per second, so keep that number in mind too. Most people aren’t looking for or expecting really smooth animation with GIFs, but if you are hoping to use a GIF as a video clip replacement due to its smaller file size, you’ll want to keep an eye on the number of frames per second.

So, then I click on the “Make GIF” button and my GIF will open in my preferred web browser. There you can download it or drag it to your desktop and voila, you have a GIF!

Neat! The picture is changing!

Now this GIF is fairly large, dimensions-wise, for a GIF, but since it’s only three images, it’ll still be a fairly small file size. Checking it reveals that it’s only 216 KB, which is not too bad. To give perspective, the blogging platform Tumblr, which is where a lot of GIFs live, has a GIF file size limit of 2 MB. If your GIF is more than 2 MB I would say that it’s probably too big, but you can change that through making your starting images’ dimensions smaller, using fewer images, or changing the quality of your images.

Enjoying Your GIF

If you’re on a Mac, you might open your GIF and be a little sad because it’s not moving. If you want to look at it, either select it in your Finder and hit the spacebar — this will let you “preview” it, or control-click your image and open it in your web browser.  If you try to open it in the Preview application, it will open it as the series of images that makes up your GIF, rather than animating it for you. This can be useful if you want to, say, delete a couple of frames out of your finished GIF, but that seems to be a little bit buggy at this time.

GIFs can also be enjoyed on WordPress sites and on the above-mentioned Tumblr. In fact, if you’re planning on using GIFs in a class, having a class Tumblr would be a great way for everyone to share their GIFs, plus Tumblr could be accessed via any computer and pulled up onto a classroom projector in a jiff (giff?)! Keep in mind, though, that GIFs do not play well with Facebook, so if you want to impress any Facebook friends with your GIF-making abilities, you’re going to have to put it online somewhere else, grab the link to your image, then share the link on Facebook.

That’s all for now; time to go out and impress your friends and colleagues! Next time, I’ll show you how to make GIFs from videos, which is even more fun than making them from still images.

The post How to Make a GIF Part 1, Using Still Images appeared first on Academic Technology.

During my recent Blackboard Basics class on tests in Blackboard I heard a lot about how long it takes to create test questions. Professors shared their frustration about the time lag between clicking on an option (say, adding a unmatched answer to a matching question) and the Blackboard screens reloading. The class agreed that it took two or three minutes a question. That doesn’t sound unreasonable, until you realize that a test can have fifty or a hundred questions, which translated into three to five hours creating test questions.

Thankfully there’s a much faster way to create test questions in Blackboard — by uploading a text file of questions directly to the test. While the steps involved can seem a little tricky at first, the reward of creating one hundred questions in under three minutes is worth it.

1. Create a New File, Preferably with Excel

The process begins by creating a tab delimited text file. There are many ways to go about this, you could type in MSWord, hitting the tab key between sections, then saving as a text file or work directly in Notepad or Textpad. I find the easiest way is to work in MS Excel, where the columns provide clear guidance on where the tab should fall.

2. Insert a Column for Question Type

Start the spreadsheet with a column for the question type indicator. These codes tell Blackboard what type of question to expect on that row. The indicators are fairly logical: MC for multiple choice, TF for true/false, and ESS for essay. A complete list of all the codes can be found on this Blackboard help page.

3. Insert Columns for Test Questions and Answers

In the column after that type your test question. The next column begins the answer. These are coded differently for the different question types. Going back to the examples above, multiple choice (i.e. “MC” in Blackboard code) questions are entered followed by a column for correct or incorrect. True/False (“TF”) questions are followed by the word “TRUE” or “FALSE.” Essay questions (“ESS”) don’t require an answer at all.

Here’s an example of how your final spreadsheet should look:

An example spreadsheet shows the column organization for uploading test questions to Blackboard.

4. Save as a Text (.txt) File

When you’ve finished entering all the questions, save the file as a text file. The option to look for in the “Save as type” box is “Text (Tab delimited) *.txt”. When you select this choice MS Excel will warn you that the features of a text file are different from those of an Excel file. Ignore that warning and save the file.

When you open your newly saved .txt file in Textpad or Notepad, it will look like this:

An example of what your spreadsheet would look like as a text file. Note the tab separations between what used to be the spreadsheet columns.

5. Upload Your Text File to Blackboard

Now it’s time to go to Blackboard and upload that file. Here are the steps:

1. Log in to Blackboard
2. Go to your course
3. Go to “Course Tools”
4. Click “Tests, Surveys, and Pools”
5. Click “Tests”
6. Click on the name of the test to access the drop-down menu
7. Click “Edit test”
8. Click “Upload Questions”
9. Click “Browse” and select the text file of questions
10. Click “Submit”

Depending on the size of your text file you might see a slight delay of less than a minute while the questions are uploaded. When it is done, you’ll see a message at the top of you saying the questions were added, and they’ll appear in the Test Canvas. At that point the questions can be edited or changed the same way you would edit or change any other test question.

Once you get the hang of it, creating test questions this way is much faster and easier than entering them one at a time. Even better, the question files on your desktop can be uploaded to multiple classes and reused as often as you’d like.

The post Quick and Easy Blackboard Test Uploading appeared first on Academic Technology.

During the prior spring semester, I took a graduate course in qualitative research methods that focused on “action research.” That’s nothing unusual as far as graduate programs go — but what made this course truly unusual was that the entire sixteen-member class worked on a single, monolithic research project examining factors contributing to successful completion of the comprehensive exam in our doctoral program. A single qualitative researcher exploring a relatively well-defined problem can generate quite a bit of data; sixteen researchers using a “grounded theory” approach to a (initially) loosely-defined problem generate absolute scads.  Luckily, living in the Internet age, we leveraged quite a bit of technology to help us track, organize, code, and make sense of the massive amount of data we were collecting.

Herding Cats with Basecamp

The first thing we realized, even before we knew exactly what we were going to do, was that we needed some way to organize ourselves. Sixteen is a large workgroup, and even organized into smaller teams, inter- and intra-group communication and coordination would still be a challenge. We used a Web-based project management tool called Basecamp to help us keep track of the project. Basecamp is one of those suites composed of several different tools that are very simple by themselves, but quite powerful when used in concert. It provides assignable to-do’s, simple text documents, file storage, events, a calendar, and will send you email to summarize what’s changed. Just about every item — individual files, tasks, etc. — has a comments section for additional communication or notations. Everything from “Who still needs to complete IRB training?” to documentary exhibits went into Basecamp.

Collaborative Writing and Sharing Files with Google Drive

We used Google Drive — as part of our student WMApps accounts — for general file storage, collaborative writing, and passing things off between teams. For example, one team might interview a subject, another small group would transcribe the interview, and yet another would code the transcription. All these files needed to be collected, organized, and passed from team to team.

We were making up filing systems as we went, but in hindsight I think it would have helped us to be more directive about designing folder schemes and determining, for example, what types of documents should live on Basecamp, which should go into Google Drive, and how to structure the folders; occasionally, it was difficult to figure out where a particular item was being stored. But in general, the system worked very well. Straight-up sharing everything does require a certain amount of trust and deliberativeness of use, since anyone could delete, rearrange, or modify anything in the project space.

We also used the integrated Google Docs functionality of our shared Drive space to do collaborative writing and editing — using features such as simultaneous work on documents and spreadsheets as well as using the commenting feature to make suggestions and offer up information to each other.

Coding Research Data with nVivo

Finally, we used a piece of qualitative data analysis software called nVivo to analyze our findings.  NVivo is standalone software that runs on PC and Mac computers — and since it wasn’t “in the cloud” we had to come up with a system for integrating parallel work into a single nVivo file. We nominated one teammate as the keeper of the master file. Teammates who coded documents — whether primary sources or interview transcripts–would create a single nVivo file per item. We would then share the files with the “keeper” who would merge those individual files into the master project. This was somewhat fraught with peril, and if I had to do it all again I’d recommend using Dedoose or another qualitative data analysis tool that natively supports collaboration.  However, we were able to make it work (due in no small part to the efforts to the teammate who shepherded the nVivo files).

A Meeting of the Minds Through an Analog Exercise

A real challenge of distributed qualitative coding is that different people come up with different codes — or even similar terms that mean different things to the individual coders. To resolve this problem and perform the necessary task of categorizing our codes into themes, we turned to a tried and true technique from the realm of strategic planning — a “snow card” exercise.  We split the entire group into four groups of four. Each group then wrote every code — around 100 or so — down on Post-It(R) notes and went through the process of arranging them all into categories. Each team then wrote their categories down on Post-Its, stuck them on a whiteboard in the classroom, and collaboratively agreed upon a common set.

With that done, the keeper of our master nVivo file could use nVivo’s powerful organizational capability to rename codes across the entire project and also put them into individual categories- – giving us the capability to, for example, show in a few clicks a report of every datum that corresponded to a particular code or theme.

Technology, Our Mediator

If our semester’s work proved anything, it’s that sixteen determined people can do an amazing amount of work over the course of the semester. We generated hundreds of files, interviewed several students and faculty, transcribed those interviews, coded interviews and artifacts, themed our codes, and finally (as the “action” piece of our action research) wrote a sixty-some-odd page manual for our fellow students delineating our findings as recommendations to our fellow future colleagues in the EPPL (Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership) doctoral program.

I don’t think we could have done it without technology, especially since many of our class members live outside of Williamsburg and/or have full-time jobs. Future iterations of the course will certainly improve the process, but we were, after all, building the ship as we sailed along.

The post A Homebrew Method of Collaborative Qualitative Research appeared first on Academic Technology.

Here’s the first installment of technology tips for leading study abroad courses. For this first post in the series on study abroad technology tips, we’ll begin with before you leave for your trip. Imagine that it’s about two weeks before your trip, and you know that you need to get ready for documenting your adventures and your research projects. Here’s what I’d recommend you do to get thinking about how to prepare.

What to Pack, a Bare Bones List

1. Your smart phone and charger (that’s an obvious one). Bring some earbuds also. An extra pair is probably smart.
2. At least a couple of universal adapters. Many have USB ports these days; opt for one with at least one USB port.
3. If you are bringing a camera, make sure to bring extra batteries, especially if the battery is a rechargeable battery pack. Don’t forget your battery charger either. Bringing several SD memory cards are also important.
4. If you are bringing a computer, make sure to bring your power cable.
5. Will you need to bring any other special equipment? Audio recorder? Video recorder? Will you need a tripod? Make sure you have batteries, extra memory cards, and cables for all that stuff.
6. Bring a backup USB hard drive that is charged by your computer’s USB port. You don’t want to lose all your data, and you probably aren’t going to be able to plug in a powered USB drive. These things are super cheap and are really important for anyone recording video or audio and/or taking lots of photos. You can buy a 1TB drive for around $60 today.

Like I said, this list is very bare bones. There may be some other things you need, but the list above should get you started. Please let me know if you can think of other crucial equipment and I’ll add them to my list.

Get Your Smart Phone in Order

Okay, so you’ve got everything. Next step is to make sure your smart phone is prepared for the trip.

A dictionary app can be very useful while abroad.

What apps do you need? Travel and study abroad require lots of apps that you may already be using, but maybe not. Here is a list of some of my favorites:

1. Exif Wizard (iPhone) or Exif Viewer (Android). As long as you turn on location services, these apps allow you to see where your photos were taken, even if your phone service is turned off because you don’t have an international calling plan (more on this later). Knowing the exact geolocation of your photos is great in general, but depending on the research project you’re doing, this feature could be invaluable.
2. Skype or some other calling app. Skype is my standby. Make sure to put some money on your account before you leave home and you can use Skype anywhere you have WiFi to call other Skype users or any telephone in the world! Keep in touch with Grandma (or not)!
3. Unless you’re absolutely fluent, download a good dictionary if you’re traveling to a country where they don’t speak English. Keep in mind that most of the free ones are not very good. The good ones cost money but are really worth it. I suggest downloading your dictionary because you will undoubtedly need your dictionary somewhere you don’t have WiFi access.
4. Google Maps. Google Maps is great and can even work with moderately good results if you don’t have WiFi.
5. Find My iPhone or Find My Android. You don’t want to lose your phone, I know. You don’t even want to think about losing your phone. If you download and activate this app, there’s a slight chance you will be able to recover your smart phone if you lose it. I dropped mine off a mountain in Iceland, and Find My iPhone was completely useless for that, but hey, it’s worth a shot.
6. Audio Recording app like Instant Audio Recorder (iPhone) or one of the gazillion audio recorders they make for the Android. This is extremely important if you will be doing any audio interviews or want to record street sounds, music, etc.

There are lots of other cool apps for specific projects, too many to name here, but a few honorable mentions are YouTube Capture (allows you to record, edit, and upload videos to YouTube), iTimeLapse (do cool time lapse videos of street scenes, traffic, you name it), Map My Hike (great for, well, mapping your hike), Google Translate, and maybe a good word processing app. I use the MS Word app, but there are others. Last but not least, I HIGHLY recommend getting a Dropbox account if you don’t already have one and download the Dropbox app to your phone. You can save photos, videos, documents, etc. directly to Dropbox from your phone and share weblinks to those items with the world.

Avoiding Extra Phone Charges

Okay, so you’ve got all your apps loaded onto your phone. If you can think of other cool study abroad/travel related apps I haven’t mentioned here, let me know. But now, for those of you who will not be using their smartphones with an international calling plan, you will want to make sure you turn off the cellular voice and data on your phone, or you can very easily double the cost of your trip in phone charges. Here’s how to do it on an iPhone:

Go to Settings > Cellular > switch Cellular Data to off, then turn Voice Roaming off, and then scroll down to the bottom of that page and Reset Statistics. That will reset your Call Time and Cellular Data Usage to zero. You can check every few days to make sure that those numbers stay at zero (or pretty darn close) to make sure you aren’t going to get a huge bill as a surprise when you get back home.

Okay, that’s all for today. Next time, I’ll talk about how to use some of the equipment you’re bringing.

The post Study Abroad Technology Tips Part One, Preparing for Your Trip appeared first on Academic Technology.