Thursday, November 20, 2008

SMU Forms

Did you know that Business Office forms are now located under the SMU Services Tab within Blackboard? This is where you should be going to find/fill out the most current Business office forms. Students will see only the forms they need Faculty/Staff will see form pertaining to them.

Modifying SMU Tabs in Blackboard

Did you know that you can personalize or modify Blackboard tabs and layout?

You can change the look and feel of the main page, by clicking on Modify Layout under My SMU.
Here you can change the color and customize the layout.
Also, with Modify Content, you can add or delete modules. Just click in the box to select or unselect what you want to show on your Blackboard.
The modules that are checked in RED, are system defaults, those cannot be changed.
Chad has created several tutorials that demonstrate what you can do or change in Blackboard.

To see the recordings, go to www2.smumn.edu/helpdesk
Click on Training, then from the Web Tutorials, click Blackboard, from Blackboard Tutorials, click Blackboard again.
Here you will find a list of tutorials:

Overview of Blackboard
Adding Course Content
Changing Look & Feel of Courses
Managing Courses
Communication Tools
Gradebook
Assessment Tools

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

New Tegrity Features Underscore Campus-wide Scalability, Collaborative Learning

SANTA CLARA, CA – October 22, 2008 – Tegrity, provider of the leading class capture web service for higher education, announced that it will unveil powerful enhancements to its award-winning Tegrity Campus 2.0 web service at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference next week. Consistent with its mission of enhancing student achievement, satisfaction and retention, these outstanding new features extend Tegrity Campus 2.0 to create a richer, more collaborative learning experience that maximizes student academic performance while enriching the pedagogic experience of faculty.

“Tegrity changed the class capture game by eliminating the need for special hardware or software and by introducing the only patented ‘search anything’ capability. Now we’re doing it again by introducing Tegrity Community, which enables communication and collaboration between Tegrity users, tools for evaluating Tegrity’s impact on student achievement and retention, and management tools that enable institutions to rapidly scale campus-wide,” said Isaac Segal, Chief Executive Officer of Tegrity. “With over 2.5 million student views last year alone, hundreds of Tegrity clients are demonstrating daily the impact of Tegrity on student achievement and retention.”

Leveraging Class Capture To Create Collaborative Learning Environment

An integral component of Tegrity Campus 2.0, Tegrity Community facilitates communication and collaboration among students, faculty, IT/ET staff and campus administrators within their own institutions and between institutions. Users can exchange best practices and course content, as well as brainstorm ideas for enhancing Tegrity ROI. Powerful tools enriching the user experience include:

• Role-based access to forums and one-to-one communication tools: enable student, faculty and administrative users to connect directly in a safe, secure environment
• Ability to post and share content: all Tegrity users and institutions are able to download, comment, and/or rank content posted by fellow-users. All content posted is categorized and fully searchable.

Key Performance Data, Usage Monitoring Drive Outcome Assessment

Significant new Tegrity reporting features help clients monitor Tegrity usage on campus in a timely manner, assess the impact of Tegrity on academic performance, and measure the return on investment. Tegrity reporting capabilities include:

• End-of-Term Assessments: Institutions can benchmark student achievement and retention against Tegrity usage, correlating grade point averages and course completion rates.
• Weekly reports of key performance indicators can be easily accessed online, or automatically delivered to designated recipients to track the number of students accessing a class and/or course, student views, faculty users, and actual faculty recordings.
• Detailed analyses: Users can also drill further into each key performance indicator to measure and evaluate usage by specific students and/or instructors within specific classes or courses.
Extended Search Fuels Student Achievement

This update extends the current patented Tegrity “search anything” capability that searches any word/phrase projected in class to include instructor audio and any supplemental content a faculty member chooses to add to their Tegrity recordings, regardless of whether the phrase derives from PowerPoint slides, web pages or computer applications.
Centralized Management Capabilities Enhance the Already Scalable Campus-wide Tegrity Service

As the leading class capture web service, Tegrity continues to set the standard for scalable, campus-wide deployment by adding to its robust portfolio of management tools:

• Automatic backup and restore: An institution can elect to backup and/or restore all Tegrity content, or just content for a specific course or class. This feature also includes the option of choosing whether to retain or remove inactive content (e.g. from previous terms) any time.
• Secure login control: At their discretion, IT administrators can require login campus-wide or within a specific recording station.
• System Performance Monitoring: Assuring a high service level, Tegrity monitors critical resources and components and issues alerts when critical levels are reached.
Further Reduce the Institution’s Cost of Ownership By Giving Users 24x7 Access To Help Resources

From within Tegrity Campus 2.0, resources from Tegrity, Tegrity Community, and individual institutions are now just one click away. This allows student, faculty and administrative users to conveniently access help and support tailored to meet their needs around the clock, including user knowledge bases, frequently asked questions, user documentation, tutorials, Tegrity support, and help desk resources.

About Tegrity
Tegrity Campus 2.0 is the leading class capture web service impacting learning, student satisfaction and retention across the entire institution. Requiring no hardware or software installation, Tegrity Campus 2.0 makes class time available all the time by automatically capturing, storing and indexing every class on campus for replay by every student. Educators know that the more students can see, hear, and experience a class, the better they learn. With patented Tegrity “search anything” technology, students instantly recall key class moments for replay online, or on iPods and mobile devices. Tegrity is based in Santa Clara, California with regional offices throughout the United States. For more information, visit www.tegrity.com