ANGEL Community Hub

As reports of cases of the H1N1 flu virus increase around the country, Penn State recognizes that large numbers of faculty and students may be unable to teach or attend classes due to illness or because they are home-bound, caring for family members. ANGEL, Penn State's course management system (https://cms.psu.edu/default.asp), can be a vital resource for sustaining the continuity of your class during this time. ANGEL can assist instructors with delivering content to students, by fostering communication and discussion between instructors and students as well as student-to-student communication, and by providing a medium for assessment and feedback. Below are some steps instructors can take using ANGEL in order to continue teaching and learning activities with minimal disruption even if classroom attendance or traditional instruction is not possible.

Adding Robust Content to Your ANGEL Course
You can upload a wide variety of file types into ANGEL for students to download, including Web pages, text documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, audio files, and more. Almost all file types are supported within ANGEL, although it is important...read more

Fostering Communication and Discussion
ANGEL has several kinds of communication tools to aid instructors with keeping the students informed as well as maintaining class discussion and interaction. These tools include Discussion Forums, Course Mail, Live Chat as well as Announcements and Polls...read more

Using ANGEL for Assessment and Feedback
ANGEL has a variety of ways to assess student work including the ability to grade all lesson content items and link them to the Gradebook. The most common assessment items include quizzes, drop boxes, and discussion forums...read more

Can anyone tell me what the limit is for the number of characters that an instructor can put into the text box (remarks field) when commenting on student submissions to the drop box. An instructor was showing me that comments she made there are now truncated - too long.. and she doesn't want to use attachments. She siad she used to be able to put longer comments there.
Thanks!

Faculty are invited to learn and share effective uses of technology to enhance teaching and learning at the free Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. The Symposium will take place on March 27, 2010 at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel in University Park. The theme of this year's symposium is "Digital Scholarship and the Culture of Teaching and Learning." Our keynote speaker is Dr. Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. His videos on culture, technology, education, and information have been featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities. There is no registration fee and a continental breakfast and lunch will be provided. For more information and updates, please visit the Symposium site.

It used to be that when you added a link and selected "New Window" and "No banner" as the target settings that ANGEL would open the link in a new tab outside of ANGEL - but now (at least in Firefox) the link is still opening up with the ANGEL navigation/settings options still there - like it is still within the framework of ANGEL and this is causing me problems with printing some things - and it is still referencing a long url with cms as the start... I want students to have access to the actual link so they can bookmark it if they would like to - is there a way to get links to work as true links? not referencing something from within ANGEL?

Thanks!

An instructor has asked me if the assignments (ANGEL quizzes and dropboxes) can automatically appear in the ANGEL calendar based on our due dates for those objects. I've been trying to figure out how to configure these assignments to show up in the calendar.

Does anyone know if I can configure the calendar to look at the assignment due dates and create entries automatically? or do I have to do this manually?

BTW the "ANGEL® 7. 1 INSTRUCTOR REFERENCE MANUAL" doesn't mention anything about automatic entries.

1) When using ANGEL mail, I see folks are recommending always using the View Inbox within a course (rather than Quick Message) and this will probably side-step the problem I keep running into with faculty as well... but was also wondering if there is a fix for this...

On 2 different computers on campus, when faculty were trying to use the Quick Message "To" feature - when the pop-up opens, the "OK" button that lets you go back to compose the message is off the screen - and when I try to drag it up a little just to get to the "OK" it just snaps back where it was and you can't get to it without using the tab button to tab through options - even then you can't tell if you are actually on the OK button becasue you can't see it...

This is a recording of a Town Hall session I delivered simultaneously to a live audience and via Adobe Connect. The was an open discussion forum where the new tools and features of ANGEL 7.3 were explored in depth. Topics covered included several interface changes, some updated features, as well as some new ones. Click here to play the Adobe Connect recording: ANGEL 7.3 Town Hall.