Developers+

We all see how technology is now an inseparable part of education. What we don’t always see are effective ways to implement it.

Blackboard partner SlideShark does.

Thanks to SlideShark 3.0, a new, free iOS app, faculty can deliver PowerPoint presentations via iPads and other iOS devices.

 

The usual suspects are included: slide previews, timer controls, a notes display section. So are new features: broadcasting, real-time annotation. Like Blackboard, SlideShark is harnessing technology to build a better education experience.

This means that when you’re presenting to both an in-person and online class, you can invite attendees via email to view the presentation from within the app and with a simple click. You can even invite people once the presentation is in progress.

Additionally, presenters can highlight, draw, and erase on the presentation throughout the session—and save this work for future use.

A York College instructor reports, “SlideShark enables our faculty to become comfortable using iPads in the classroom as instructional tools. With SlideShark, they aren’t afraid of this new technology. They can…use [an] iPad for presenting to the students.”

Think back to the familiar refrain from the classic picture book The Little Engine That Could: “I think I can, I think I can…” The tech has changed but the advice is timeless: if you put your mind to something (in this case, using the SlideShark 3.0 app to jazz up classroom presentations), you’ll like the results.

To learn more, tune in on Tuesday, May 7th at 2pm (ET). We think you can.

 

“Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots – but you have to play the ball where it lies,” said the American amateur golfer, Bobby Jones. The game is catching on with more and more young athletes, playing for fun, on school teams, and in youth golf tournaments. Aside from the life-lessons golf teaches — among them problem-solving, honor and honesty, and patience — golf is also a great illustration of STEM concepts, from friction and spin on tee-off, to the math of calculating a handicap.

NBC Learn’s newest Special Collection is “Science of Golf,” a new video series produced in partnership with the United States Golf Association (USGA) and Chevron. Among the video titles:

“Volume, Displacement & Buoyancy”
“Evolution of the Golf Ball”
“Calculating a Golf Handicap Index”
“Evolution of the Golf Club”

View these videos at nbclearn.com/golf

Using rich media solutions, like video, in the classroom helps enable the development of media literacy, higher order thinking skills, and a deeper connection to the curriculum being explored. Recently, Blackboard expanded its partnership with Kaltura, the world’s first Open Source Online Video Platform, to all institutions using Moodlerooms’s Moodle-based platform, joule. Also new, Blackboard and Kaltura are now offering the Blackboard Building Block™ more broadly to Blackboard Learn™ customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, expanding the availability of Kaltura’s video tools and capabilities in Blackboard’s flagship learning management system.

Like Blackboard, Kaltura strives to make the learning experience seamless for faculty and students. Video wasn’t always easily accessible to Blackboard users, as you can learn from the video below. In the past, instructors would go to one system to upload and manage content and then grab an embed code to add video to the appropriate web page or course.  At the very least, this was an inconvenient workflow; in a worst case scenario, this could be time consuming and problematic for the instructor.

The Kaltura Video Building Block removes these manual steps from the process of assigning videos to various courses, assignments and pages. Users can stay within the Blackboard Learn platform through the entire process – essentially all content can be pushed into Blackboard programmatically and any Blackboard specific data can be synched back to the Kaltura system automatically. The result? A seamless experience for faculty and students.

Start a FREE TRIAL today or learn more about the Kaltura Video Building Block.

The National University of Ireland – Galway (NUI Galway) offers a wide variety of academic disciplines to more than 17,000 students. With each passing semester, the university looks for new ways to incorporate technology in an effort to help students with their careers after graduation.

Four years ago, NUI Galway implemented the Blackboard Learn™ platform campus-wide. Staff members quickly began using Blackboard, increasing the appeal of and demand for technology in the classroom. With this increase in usage came other challenges, the biggest of which was managing video on campus. Staff members wanted to use video in the classroom, but the university didn’t have the proper storage capacity.

Digital Content Resources to Help You Get Ready for the Fall Semester

With the publisher building blocks which you’ve no doubt heard a lot about this past summer, faculty have the opportunity to integrate digital content from Higher Ed’s leading publishers into their courses. Faculty can pick and choose rich digital content from a wide variety of publisher sources, including Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Wiley, all seamlessly integrated into the Blackboard Learn platform.

If you’ve already installed these building blocks, you may be wondering how you help your faculty get started. We’ve consolidated a number of publisher resources on linking accounts, pairing courses, adding content and more – all within Blackboard Learn.