BuzzLion for the Week of May 11

Posted on May 16, 2008 
Filed Under BuzzLion, Uncategorized

It snowed in Happy Valley Monday. Yes, snow after Finals Week. In the face of such hardships, the staff of ETS soldiered on and continued the work of bringing technology innovation to education.

Cole Camplese, ETS director, and Chris Millet, manager, advanced learning projects, are at Harvard Law School for the Berkman@10, The Future of the Internet event. Cole is posting updates on his blog. They are worth reading as a lot of what is being discussed has a lot of relevance for teaching and learning with technology.

Brett Bixler, lead instructional designer, recently blogged at the Educational Gaming Commons on comic books and education. He even has a few ideas on how to work Web 2.0 into them.

Elizabeth Pyatt, instructional designer, posted a “hot team paper” on social ratings and their educational impact. Hot teams, by the way, are a group within ETS that takes some time to examine an emerging technology to see if it has any potential for use in education.

Elizabeth also announced new ANGEL Town Hall meetings to discuss the upcoming ANGEL upgrade to 7.2.

Some news from around ETS:

Faculty, staff invited to participate in beta test of enhanced version of Turnitin

Turnitin is conducting a beta test of a new, enhanced version of their Web-based plagiarism prevention resource, and faculty and staff are invited to participate. Some of the enhancements being evaluated include a redesigned interface, expanded student paper databases, improved Originality Reports, and expanded content databases.

For more information about participating in the beta test and to see demonstrations of some of the enhancements, please attend one of two informative online sessions offered Thursday, May 15 at 1:00 p.m. or Friday, May 16 at 10:00 a.m. in the Adobe Connect meeting room at https://breeze.psu.edu/turnitin/.

Before joining a Connect meeting, please read through the Getting Started information at http://meeting.psu.edu/quickstart and test your connection with our generic test meeting room at https://breeze.psu.edu/testmeetingroom/. Questions can be directed to turnitin@psu.edu.

ANGEL to be upgraded to version 7.2 weekend of July 19

During the weekend of July 19, Information Technology Services (ITS) plans to upgrade Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL, from version 7.1 to 7.2. The new version will feature enhancements to several existing tools, and several new tools will help course editors perform administrative tasks. For the most part, however, the interface and functionality will remain familiar to users.

Enhanced tools include course/group mail, chat, reports, and the HTML editor used in text entry fields.

Using the ANGEL 7.2 mail tool, users will be able to access mail from all their courses and groups at once, either from a component on the My Profile page or from within a course or group.

The chat tool, which has a new look, will open in a new window. As messages are posted, the screen will refresh instantly, with no lag time. A related chat tool, called Live Office Hours, provides a way for instructors to meet with students individually online. As students select the link for the Live Office Hours chat, they are placed in a queue, then allowed into the chat one at a time. Each student can only see his/her own messages and those of the instructor. When the instructor sets up the times/dates for Live Office Hours, these times and dates are automatically added to the course calendar.

On the course Report tab, the same types of reports can be generated as before; however, users will see changes to the names of some fields and the arrangement of the screen. Once a report is generated, a user can click the new Print Preview button to generate a PDF to print or save.

The new inline HTML editor will be integrated with each text area, rather than opening in a new window as before. The tool will feature improved functionality, including a more robust equation editor and the ability to create form fields. The equation editor, which includes the functionality of the WebEQ application, allows a user to build an equation right within an ANGEL text area, eliminating the need to build an equation using an application outside ANGEL, then importing it. The HTML editor, including the improved equation editor, will be available to students in a quiz essay question.

New tools in ANGEL 7.2 include a new Permissions tab within the roster editor and a Date Manager for lesson content items.

Within the roster editor, when an instructor is editing the entry for a course member, the settings will be arranged on two tabs. The first contains the familiar user settings. The second is the new Permissions tab. Here, an instructor can assign read/write or read-only permission for chat, mail, and discussion forums. When assigning permissions to a fellow course editor, the instructor can grant or deny permission to edit various portions of the course.

In ANGEL 7.1, instructors assign start and end dates for lesson content items within the settings for each individual item. In ANGEL 7.2, a new Date Manager located on the Manage tab streamlines this task. It allows an instructor to set dates for all content items in a single location. If the course is then copied into another section, for example, in a subsequent term, the dates can be adjusted more easily.

While the new version of ANGEL is being implemented the weekend of July 19 this year, ITS anticipates returning to its schedule of performing the upgrade between the spring and summer I terms in the future.

For any questions, contact ANGEL support at angelsupport@psu.edu.

That’s all for this week’s BuzzLion. If you have anything of interest you would like us to mention here, please email jco11@psu.edu. Thanks for reading!

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