Webinar: The Next Big Thing: Blackboard / McGraw-Hill Partnership

This webinar is hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education. We encourage you to register - see below...

The evolution of mobile and digital technologies has reached its next milestone within education — interactive, digital learning content. Join us as Blackboard’s Katie Blot, Senior Vice President of Consulting, and McGraw-Hill’s Doug Hughes, Director of Digital Partnerships, lead the conversation on technology changes within education and how digitally delivered content is leading educators to the next frontier of how they use technology in the classrooms. Plus, take a look inside Blackboard and McGraw-Hill’s new, integrated solution. The Next Big Thing in Digital Education: the Blackboard and McGraw-Hill Higher Education Partnership February 17, 2011 • 2pm EST / 11am PST Gain valuable insight into how digital technology can promote: Student success Educator efficiency Thriving institutions Don’t miss this exciting webinar event, register now. Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you believe may be interested in attending this informative Webinar. This free Webinar is presented by Blackboard and hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education. All content presented during the event is provided by Blackboard.

Blackboard Collaborate Distinguished Lecture Series

Blackboard Collaborate is the name of the new online classroom system to be based on Elluminate and its former competition, Wimba, which were both bought by Blackboard earlier this year.

"Formed by the union of industry leaders Wimba and Elluminate, Blackboard Collaborate delivers open, education-focused collaboration solutions that enhance learning, reduce costs, and improve outcomes by enabling anywhere, anytime, instruction, meetings, and help."

Here are links to archives of excellent presentations that are of interest to faculty who would like to learn more about teaching online.

The 10 Biggest Myths About Synchronous Online Teaching 
by Ted Bongiovanni and Roseanna DeMaria
New York University, School of Continuing and Professional Studies

Building Campus Community and Conducting Staff Training Instantly with Pronto 
by Eric Kunnen of Grand Rapids Community College and
Jenny Jones of Holmes Community College

Increasing Enrollment Using Wimba Classroom
by Rick Bebout, West Virginia University

Blackboard Collaborate is scheduled to debut this summer. Though the above webinars were recorded with Wimba Classroom, the new Blackboard product will be based on the Elluminate infrastructure. Sign up for a trial of Elluminate Live.

National Distance Learning Week

Free Webinars: November 8-12, 2010

The purpose of National Distance Learning Week (NDLW) is to generate greater awareness and appreciation for distance learning, including K-12, Higher Education, Corporate and Military, while recognizing leaders and best practices in the field.

Register for these free webinars

MONDAY

Event: Integration of Virtual Education
Date: November 8, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon
This webinar will explore how the use of related information, communication, and educational technologies are being used to support and improve Pre K-12 / home school based learning and student achievement.

Event: Higher Education
Date: November 8, 2010
Time: 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
This webinar will explore a broad range of issues related to the institution's/unit's practices and procedures as new global campuses become the norm and the traditional education landscape transforms.

TUESDAY

Event: Blending Learning
Date: November 9, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon
This webinar will explore the economy of scale and power of blended learning which is derived from its "elasticity:" the ability to integrate a variety of synchronous and asynchronous media allowing the instructional designer to attain the most appropriate blended learning solution. Download your FREE copy of the USDLA Instructional Media Selection Guide for Distance Learning authored by Dr. Jolly Holden and Dr. Philip Westfall.

Event: Measuring Effectiveness
Date: November 9, 2010
Time: 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
This webinar will educate organizations on how to measure effectiveness and report. This will include discussions on showing the real value for your talent programs. Explain how your hard work benefits your company, in real dollars. Benchmark your company's programs against those in your industry, or in all industries. Improve your bottom line by understanding and using the talent in your organization, and streamlining your processes.

WEDNESDAY
Event: Virtual Worlds
Date: November 10, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon
This webinar will provide an overview of virtual worlds while examining popular virtual world applications.  This session will also help you to frame an understanding of virtual worlds and their appropriate application.

Event: Professional Online Educator - Faculty Preparation for Excellence in Online Teaching
Date: November 10, 2010
Time: 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
The role of the educator has undergone a paradigm shift in order to keep pace with mainstream acceptance of online teaching at primary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions of learning. Educators, administrators, and education organizations and institutions recognize the need to verify that pre-service teachers, traditional classroom teachers, and novice online teachers can affect a meaningful transfer of knowledge in myriad online learning environments. In this session, learn how online teaching skills will address a growing market need and the desire of educators, administrators, and education organizations to ensure quality online instruction. 

THURSDAY

Event: About USDLA Membership and How You Can Get Involved!
Date: November 11, 2010
Time: 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
This webinar will explore the United States Distance Learning Association, which is a non-profit organization formed in 1987 and is located in Boston, Massachusetts. USDLA promotes the development and application of distance learning for education and training and serves the needs of the distance learning community by providing advocacy, information, networking and opportunity. Distance education and training constituencies served include pre-k-12 education, higher and continuing education, home schooling, as well as business, corporate, military, government, and telehealth markets.

FRIDAY
Event: Brain-based Learning
Date: November 12, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon
The brain is comprised of billions of neurons (brain cells) connected with trillions of "synaptic" connections between the neurons. Recent research indicates that learning happens in a human brain when a group of neurons are able to form a network passing information between them in the form of electro-chemical signals. Brain-based learning has the potential to enable curriculum content to be adapted to individualized learning pathways ensuring an increase in learning effectiveness and efficiency as well as improvement in student engagement and evaluation measurements.

Event: Mobile Learning
Date: November 12, 2010
Time: 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
With the number of mobile phones approaching 5 billion subscribers globally, mobile learning has the potential to deliver effective education and training to these busy workers.  This webinar will provide some examples and insight into this globally expanding market.

New features in Google Apps

News update from the Google Apps for Education Team:

With the school year in full swing, we have several new product features to help you stay ahead of the game. We’ve specifically focused on responding to feedback with our new Unthreaded Conversation view in Gmail, and collaboration with our new revision history interface in Docs. We also have milestones to celebrate: our four-year anniversary and having 10 MILLION students, faculty, and staff using Google Apps for Education! To stay on top of announcements, you can get new feature notifications by email or subscribe to the RSS feed.

New features in Google Apps

Unthreaded Conversation View
Gmail now offers users the ability to switch between conversation view and the traditional message-based unthreaded view. When a user switches to unthreaded view in 'Settings', messages are no longer grouped together into a conversation, and each message is shown as a separate entry in the inbox.

Read more about unthreaded conversation view in this blog post.

Priority Inbox
Priority Inbox is a new, alternative view of your Gmail inbox that helps solve the problem of email overload. With Priority Inbox, Gmail automatically identifies your important email and separates it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters. Priority Inbox is still in beta and is not the default view for Gmail users.

Read more about priority inbox in the Help Center.
 
Revision History in Docs
We updated the revision history interface to make it easier for collaborators to manage document revisions. Click on 'File > See revision history' to see the new interface. Users can click on an arrow to see the timestamp or use the arrow keys to navigate the changes. Changes to text are now also color-coded based on each collaborator, making it easy to tell what has been added or deleted.

Read more about the new revision history interface in the Help Center.

New version of Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook®
We released a new version of this tool which now supports Microsoft Outlook® 2010 in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. In addition, this version also includes improvements to rich contact data from the global address list, as well as enhanced support for 'custom from' addresses. 

Updated Gmail app for Android devices
We recently released a new version of the Gmail app in Android, so Gmail updates aren’t tied to Android version releases anymore. Now you can get new Gmail stuff faster without having to wait for system updates. In this new version, we improved message replies, access to quoted text, and more. More information on this release here.


Get started with USciences Google Apps Domain
Logon with your USciences username and password at start.online.usp.edu.

Undergraduate Students and Information Technology

In the recently released report from the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR), they found that students owned the following devices:

• 83.8% have laptops
• 62.7% have hand-held devices with Internet access
• 45.9% have desktop computers
• 13% have netbook computers
• 3.1% have e-readers

About 42% are considered "power users". Here is the breakdown of Internet-Capable Handheld Device Use among students (click to enlarge):

About 25% of students said they use e-textbooks in their courses, but it appears they use their computers or hand-held devices to access the e-texts, not dedicated e-readers. When asked what Web-based technologies students use in their courses, they said:

• Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, etc: 36.2% — for collaborative use: 53%
• Wikis (Web pages that can be created and/or edited by a group of people): 33.1% — for collaborative use: 30.7%
• Social networking sites: 29.4% — for collaborative use: 49.4%
• College opinion sites (RateMyProfessors, etc.): 27.1%
• Textbook publishers’ resource sites: 26.1% — for collaborative use: 23.2%
• Video-sharing (YouTube, etc.): 24.3% — for collaborative use: 33.4%
• Blogs: 11.6% — for collaborative use: 37.6%
• College study support (Cramster, Turnitin, etc.): 10.9%

ECAR states the the most important take-away message from their survey is that there is "no stereotypical student when it comes to technology."

Is the iPad a Game Changer for E-Textbooks?

Have you dreamed of an an e-book reader that can handle textbooks and reduce the back-breaking load of dead-tree books that our students and children carry? The Kindle and various incarnations of the Sony E-Reader are fine for novels, but how can you have a textbook without color?

The Apple iPad has arrived with great fanfare. Is it the e-Textbook game changer? Universities are now making headlines by providing iPads for their students. Will faculty find that their favorite textbooks are available on this dream machine? Here, I've gathered links to recent articles and podcasts that cover the iPad as e-textbook platform. Do you think the iPad is the e-textbook game changer (add your comments below)?

The E-Textbook Experiment Turns A Page by Lynn Neary (listen to the story from NPR's "All Things Considered")

The game changer, according to Matt MacInnis, may be a little thing called the iPad. MacInnis is the founder and CEO of Inkling, a company that designs textbook software for the iPad. He says the iPad has allowed for the reinvention of the textbook.

As Textbooks Go Digital, Will Professors Build Their Own Books? By Jeffrey R. Young (read this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education)

McGraw-Hill Higher Education plans to announce its revamped custom-publishing system, called Create, with an emphasis on electronic versions of mix-and-match books. Macmillan Publishers this year announced a similar custom-textbook platform, called DynamicBooks. And upstart Flat World Knowledge touts the customization features of its textbooks, which it gives away online, charging only for printed copies and study guides.

Rod's Pulse Podcast #87: Special iPad in Education Edition (listen to this interview by Rod Murray)

Interview: Dr. Mary Ann Gawelek, Provost, Seton Hill University on "An iPad for Everyone" - Dr. Gawelek tells us about their Griffin Technology Advantage Program and how they prepared their faculty and IT infrastructure to handle iPads and MacBook Pros for all their incoming students.

Also from Rod's Pulse Podcast:

RPP #82: E-Textbooks: Are We There Yet? Interview with Scott Beadenkopf
RPP #83: E-Readers: Are We There Yet? Interview with Scott Beadenkopf (Part 2)

Campus Technology Virtual Conference - Free!

Technology Enhancing Higher Education

Mark your calendar: November 18, 2010 - 10:30am to 6:00pm ET

This is Campus Technology’s live event. Attend at no charge, and from the convenience of your computer.

• Discover how top institutions, like USC, Santa Clara and Virginia Tech, are using innovative social networking and distance learning technologies to provide enhanced teaching and learning environments on campuses around the country
• Learn from expert speakers with hands-on experience in the newest, most revolutionary ideas in education technology 
• Spend time in the real-time virtual lounge for the best peer-to-peer networking
• Explore online product and service demos from leading solution-providers presented in the virtual exhibit hall
• Take away free content downloads and presentations-to-go

Register Online: