ANGEL Community Hub

Please pass this on to all who use ANGEL for graded quizzes.

If you are going to embed a video in a quiz question that the quizzee MUST watch to answer the question, please provide alternative links to said video, and an alternative way to get at the required info - like a text transcript.

I just watched my daughter wait 30 minutes for a video to load in an ANGEL quiz. Good grief.

I've created an LOR titled "Education Technology Resources." It will hold, among other things, student tutorials on a variety of ed tech, starting with an introduction to podcasting.

Problem is, you can't access an LOR from within a group, so any students wishing to use the LOs in the LOR within their own groups can't do so.

I was hoping this would not be the case in 7.3, but it is. Any suggestions on alternatives?

I needed to list out the members from my teams. While I could use the roster to get an entire list, the team members would not be concurrent. So I used the "Remove Users" command from the Teams tool. It pulls up the team members, and you can then print out the page, copy the names (Hold the Cmd key down on a Mac for JUST the names), and so on.

Is there a better/easier way to do this?

Once a student is assigned to a team, how does s/he know who the other members are? I thought this used to be easy, but can't see how to do it easily in v7.

Picking up on Mary's great idea, let me introduce myself.

I'm Brett Bixler, Penn State's Lead Instructional Designer and Manager of Instructional Support and Research at Education Technology Services.

I was born in the log cabin I helped my father build.

Seriously, it was more of an A-frame.

Anyway, I've been involved with ANGEL from the decision process - do we go with ANGEL, or something else? - up until the end of the 7.1 implementation. I was in charge of documentation efforts all that time. Recently I turned over that responsibility to my worthy colleague, Jeff Swain. You may have seen his picture in a community post here if you were paying close attention.

I'm responsible for obtaining the Talisma KnowledgeBase - hope you like it!

There's lots more I could write, but ANGEL-wise, this is a good reader's digest version of me.

Oh, the picture? That's me on my second job, laying wireless cable.

There seems to be a number of reports floating around campus that Word and Excel documents stored in ANGEL are suddenly opening in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. This is not an ANGEL issue; instead, this is caused by the Google Toolbar. The toolbar has a preference for forcing the browser to open Word and Excel docs in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Affected persons should disable this feature in the toolbar's options if they do not desire this behavior.

Please contact ANGEL Support (angelsupport@psu.edu) if there are any questions on this issue.

Today, ANGEL Learning announced it's efforts in Second Life. I've attached the press release. I've been working with Ray Masters from AL for several weeks now in preparation for the announcement, and will continue to work with AL as an ANGEL/SL expert.

My hope is to assist them in developing some data transfer protocols between ANGEL and SL. For example, it would be nice to take attendance at a SL event and pump that back into an ANGEL course. Going the other way, it would be great to transfer data out of ANGEL into SL. For example, imagine being able to take data sets, send them to SL, and render them in 3D. NOAA is already doing this with weather maps. This is also possible to some extent via Moodle, an open-source CMS. The mashup is named Sloodle.

Anyway, stay tuned! For more information on Second Life, please visit my Virtual Worlds blog at

http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/virtualworlds