BbFS 34 Azalea Boehm, Univ. of Houston - Clear Lake

Azalea Boehm served as both the instructional designer and the web developer for The Sacred Feminine in Latin America, one of Blackboard's Exemplary course award winners this year. Azalea worked closely with the instructor, Dr. Van Hoy, to provide solutions that kept the best parts of the facce-to-face course while allowing Dr. Van Hoy to perform her summer research in Latin America. Azalea also performs consulting services to other schools to assist them in developing quality on-line courses.

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View course: The Sacred Feminine in Latin America

BbFS 33 Jan Engle, Gov. St. Univ, IL

Jan Engle is an Instructional Developer at Governor's State University, University Park, IL. Her "Introduction to Online Teaching" course won an Exemplary Course Award this year at Blackboard World. Listen to her tell about her design and development of this excellent course.

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BbFS 32 Cheryl Ward, Univ. of Akron

Cheryl Ward has been involved in on-line learning since she recognized its value as a special education teacher in the public schools. In this interview we discuss a large number of topics, including exponential learning, rubrics, availability of technology, and use of technology for differentiated learning.

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BbFS 31 Anita Tom, Univ. of Oklahoma

Anita Tom, Instructional Services Team Lead & CMS Applications Manager, University of Oklahoma, has an interesting story to tell. For years Oklahoma was a major Blackboard user, with an ASP hosted site. Two things occured that changed their view of Blackboard, and moved them to Desire 2 Learn. In this interview we discuss those events and what has happened since at Oklahoma.

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BbFS 30 Eric Kunnen and Garret Brand, Grand Rapids CC

Garry Brand, Associate Professor, Business Law & Faculty Development Coordinator, and Eric Kunnen, Coordinator of Instructional Technologies, The Learning Academy for Faculty & Staff, talk about things that they saw at BbWorld'07, and the use of Blackboard at Grand Rapids Community College to enhance learning. This interview was done face-to-face at BbWorld'07.

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BbFS 29 BbWorld'07 Poster Sessions - Part C

Live, from BbWorld'07 in Boston, MA, two more interviews with poster presenters.

The first interview is with Daniel Lake, Systems Consultant, Onondaga-Cortland-Madison BOCES about his poster, "Supporting Social Studies in the K-12 Classrooms." His consortium is working together to share there use of Blackboard to support the teaching of Social Studies. The examples ranged from fourth grade through High School IP courses. Links to these publically accessible K-12 courses can be found on the handout, available below.

The second interview is with Melanie Best, Jeff Kurz, and Sally Yang, Texas A&M University. Their poster was "How to Increase Learning Outcomes through Technology." They talk about learning styles, tools, and learning outcomes that can result from training faculty on the uses of technology.

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Daniel Lake's Handout

BbFS 28 BbWorld'07 Poster Sessions - Part B

Live, from BbWorld'07 in Boston, MA, two more interviews with poster presenters.

The first interview is with Lillian Chenoweth, Professor of Family Studies, Texas Women's University. The poster, "Extreme Course Makeover," described the redesign of one her on-campus "Diversity" course to a 65% hybrid course, using blogs, wikis, and clickers in the classroom.

The second short interview is with Venessa Cruz, Assistant Professor, University of North Florida. Her poster, "Developing a Multimedia and Fine Art Class for Online Teaching," described her movement from a face-to-face course to an on-line course in graphic design. She describes her use of Snapz to create Mac screen videos, to create class training videos and one-off videos to answer questions.

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BbFS 27 BbWorld'07 Poster Sessions - Part A

Live, from BbWorld'07 in Boston, MA, two short interviews with poster presenters. The first interview is with Kevin Keegan and Dina Kurzweil, from Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. There poster was From the Classroom to Blackboard: Taking Faculty Professional Deveopment Online. They stress the importance of working with the faculty to build trust, and have some great techniques that can do this.

The second short interview is with Erin Soles, Coordinator of Instructional Design at the University of North Florida. Her poster, Blackboard Support Outside the Box: Going Beyond Blackboard Workshops, detailed the diverse support offerings that she has developed for her faculty.

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BbFS 26 Wayne Twitchell, Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Wayne Twitchell, Application Integrator and Developer, works on the Blackboard system at Grinnell College, a Liberal Arts college with around 1,600 students. Because of the small size of the college and common focus of the faculty, Wayne is able to be very nimble, keeping his Blackboard system on the newest version and adding Building Blocks that increase its usefulness. In this wide-ranging conversation with Wayne, we talk about his use of the Language Pack to customize the terminology, creating "Grinell English" for his system, and how he uses the first year "Tutorial" class, an introduction to liberal arts, to refresh the Blackboard training of the faculty. This is the longest recording to date, but I considered it all so valuable that I was unwilling to cut anything out.

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BbFS 25 Glenn MacDougall, Algonquin College, Ottawa, Ontario

This interview with Glenn MacDougall, Director of Learning and Teaching Services at Algonquin College, Ottawa, Ontario, describes a "plain vanilla" approach to using Blackboard to focus on student centered learning. Algonquin doesn't upgrade to new versions quickly. It doesn't use many building blocks to add new features to Blackboard. But Blackboard use is part of every class, and the general education classes are fully on-line. In addition to the use of Blackboard at Algonquin College, Glenn reflects on his participation in the Sakai and e-Learn Africa conferences this summer.

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BbFS 24 Jason Minkoff, Blackboard, Inc.

One of Jason Minkoff's duties is to direct client support for the K-12 market. As such he helps determine the work of engineering in improving the Blackboard product to meet the needs of the K-12 market.

In addition to that major responsibility, he also is the content owner of Behind the Blackboard and the new Wiki knowledge base. As such he is working to improve access to information, documentation, and downloads for all of us.

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BbFS 23 Arline Pique, Indian Hill Schools

The Indian Hill Schools have a long history of using technology, K-12, to enhance student learning. Arline Pique, District Technology Coordinator, talks about their use of Blackboard to provide standard class sites for each teacher. We also discuss some of the other technology being used by their faculty.

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BbFS 22 Jan Poston Day, Blackboard, Inc.

Jan Poston Day, Director of Client Engagement, has a number of fascinating responsibilities at Blackboard. In this interview we talk about the Developers Network, standards organizations, user communities, and more. This is the first of what I hope will be monthly interviews with people who work for Blackboard, Inc.

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BbFS 21 Kevin Kelly, San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University is moving from Blackboard to Moodle. Kevin Kelly talks about some reasons for the change, how they have taken advantage of the change to work with faculty in new ways, and how the faculty are responding to the new system. Kevin's experience provides him with some interesting perspectives on course management systems. For example, when he works with faculty he has them focus on how they use content, interaction, and assessment in their courses and how these can be built into course web sites.

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BbFS 20 Carolyn Thomas, Univ. of Texas at Austin

Carolyn Thomas, Blackboard Academic Program Manager at UT Austin, tells us how they used the upgrade to Bb 7.2 this summer to drive a major initiative to reach out to faculty and increase usage. She also talks about what she learned as a Greenhouse Award judge and some of the new tools and building blocks they are using.

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BbFS 19 Nick Laudato, University of Pittsburgh

The Univ. of Pittsburgh has been using Blackboard since the summer of 1998. Nick Laudato, Associate Director of the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education, talks about their various training techniques, their use of course templates, and their Mcast site (http://www.pitt.edu/~ciddeweb/) which contains many presentations on a variety of subjects.

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BbFS 18 Gary Friesen, Taylor University, Upland, Indiana

Gary Friesen, Director of Academic Technology at Taylor University, creates a course site for each of the 1,850 students at Taylor, so they can use it as an ePortfolio site. He keeps a blog of his activites at grfriesen.typepad.com and manages a Tablet PC lab, among other topics that we discuss.

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Blog: http://grfriesen.typepad.com/

BbFS 17 Liz Van Kleeck, Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois

Liz Van Kleeck, an Educational Technologist in Academic Technology Services, part of ITS, at Loyola University, in Chicago, is involved in training, support, the digital media room, and the new information commons being built on the lake. Listen to her discussion of the exciting things taking place at Loyola.

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BbFS 16 David Fraedrich, Maricopa Community College District

The Maricopa Community College System is unifying all their CMS activites into Blackboard, managed by the District Office. The Blackboard Alliance, with representatives from each of the colleges, including administration, faculty, help desk, and teaching and learning, is organized to meet the needs of the users: students and faculty. Dave talks about their activities in this 34 minute interview.

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BbFS 15 Tony Turin, UNF

Tony Turin was the Online Learning Technology Coordinator of the Blackboard system at the University of North Florida and is now Business Analyst, Information Technology Services. He works closely with the Center for Instructional Technology to identify faculty needs and provide solutions through Blackboard and other ITS services. He also shares some of his experiences as coordinator of the BbSEUG Conference 2007.

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BbFS 14 Glen Parker, USF

Glen Parker is the Blackboard System Administrator at the University of Southern Florida. USF has been using Blackboard since CourseInfo 4, and has it tightly integrated with their other academic and administrative systems. Glen talks about their upcoming hardware upgrade, support issues, and development activities at USF.

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BbFS 13 Betsey Barnett, Shoreline CC

Betsey Barnett teaches Multicultural Studies on-line as well as face-to-face. She has been teaching it on-line for almost 10 years now, and has some wonderful information to share about getting students to think deeply about a subject and to recognize their own growth.

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BbFS 12 Tom Vilberg, Clarion Univ. of PA

Tom Vilberg is using on-line testing to assess class and departmental learning objectives, using the test bank from their Intro to Psychology textbook. How much do your students learn in your course? During their education? Here is a simple way to find out, at least on one dimension.

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BbFS 11 Patricia Kahn, Montclair State University

Patricia Kahn is Manager of Training and Technology at Montclair State University. Patricia talks about Montclair's Digital Mentorship Programs, as well as other activities taking place at Montclair.

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