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.

Listen to BbFS30 (22 minutes)

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.

Listen to BbFS29 (24 minutes)

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.

Listen to BbFS28 (23 minutes)

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.

Listen to BbFS27 (23 minutes)

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.

Listen to BbFS26 (68 minutes)