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With the end of the school year in sight, many educators are preparing for the upcoming prom and graduation season. These days, parents are often using text messages and mobile devices to keep in touch with their children throughout the day. Not surprisingly, district and schools leaders have taken to utilizing similar methods to reach out to parents and students during this exciting and busy time. Just as we demonstrated in our recent post on spring break messaging, Blackboard Connect is a useful tool in helping schools communicate with parents, sending targeted phone calls, emails and text messages. As schools prepare and organize end-of-the-year events, Blackboard Connect can be a valuable tool to keep parents and students aware and informed. 1. Coordination For large districts, graduation events require skillful coordination and organization due to large graduating classes. Schools sending emails with graduation event locations, times and other logistical information like available parking and pre-ceremony assemblies. In the Washoe County School District, leaders at the TMCC Magnet High school are using Connect to send messages to students asking for volunteers to speak or provide talent at this year’s graduation ceremony. During the event, schools can send text messages to designated, pre-determined groups to help ensure students arrive on time and at the proper location. 2. Fundraising and ticket sales At many schools, attending prom requires the purchase of tickets, as the proceeds help pay for the event. Depending on the size of the graduating class and the available seating at the ceremony, some senior graduation ceremonies also require guests to purchase or request tickets to accommodate attendees. To remind parents and students of deadlines to purchase tickets, many schools are using Connect to send messages with pricing information and availability. Sometimes ticket sales alone are not enough to cover the costs of end-of-the-year events, and other additional events or fundraisers are organized to help raise money to be contributed to prom and graduation events. For example, in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, the booster club is hosting a raffle for junior and senior students to win a pre-prom dinner at a nearby French restaurant. Using Connect, administrators are sending emails to parents and student with contest information and raffle ticket prices. 3. Volunteers and participation To successfully host such events, schools often need willing and able bodies to help organize and execute activities. Recruiting volunteers is one thing, but keeping them informed and coordinated can be quite another. Some schools are using Connect to do both by sending messages calling for parent or faculty volunteers, and organizing group lists to distribute messages to specified individuals during the events. If volunteering time isn’t an option for some parents, some schools are asking for donations to help with the planning process. At Chardon High School, for example, the student-led prom committee is using Connect to email parents asking them to share pictures of their students for a slideshow to be displayed during the event. 4. Expectations Graduation and prom are both exciting, highly-anticipated events for high school students. With the excitement, though, many students may be tempted to abuse drugs or alcohol. In preparing for the events, it is worthwhile to remind students of the appropriate conduct and expectations when participating in school-sponsored activities. At St. Charles North High, school leaders are using Connect to call and remind students of the mandatory guidelines to follow for this year’s prom and asked students to sign and return a ‘letter of understanding’ acknowledging and agreeing to the terms. To learn more about how you can use Blackboard Connect to communicate in your school or district, visit the website.

I met Paul Lefavi at BbWorld three years ago, so it’s only fitting that he would share his reasons for attending BbWorld 2012 with me and the rest of the ANGEL community.  Since our first meeting, I have relied on Paul’s perspective many times and appreciate his involvement in the ANGEL community programs.  Thanks, Paul, for contributing your thoughts, and I look forward to seeing you in New Orleans! Guest post by Paul Lefavi, Director of eLearning Technology, Indian River State College As I make plans to attend BbWorld 12 in New Orleans, I have been asked by a couple of colleagues why I make a point of going to this conference each year. Is it the fun and exciting places, Orlando, Las Vegas, and now the Big Easy, where the conference has been held the past few years?  Is it just the allure of getting out of town?  While both reasons would most likely crop up in a bulleted list of motives to attend, BbWorld is so much more than a few days away at a fun destination.

Strengthened by its merger with Edline, as announced last October, Blackboard is the leading provider of online learning, mass notification and website solutions for K-12 schools and districts across the country. Earlier in the month, we gathered prominent district leaders in Pittsburgh to talk about the challenges facing K-12 administrators and educators today, while discussing how Blackboard can help in overcoming those obstacles and producing meaningful academic outcomes. For many attendees, the forum provided an opportunity to share their personal experience driving innovation by implementing new technology and tools within their schools or districts. At the same time, the Blackboard team had a chance to similarly share what is to come in the next few months from K-12 solutions, especially highlighting the continued alignment of Blackboard Connect and Edline. With the end of the year rapidly approaching, the summer offers an ideal time for Blackboard Connect, AlertNow and Teleparent users to upgrade to the improved Connect 5 system. We will be hosting live client demonstrations of Connect 5 all summer to show how the streamlined interface and message creation process can help your district ‘connect with confidence.’ We’re also continually adding to Connect’s already robust feature set by releasing new enhancements like surveys, improved reporting capabilities and an Android application for message senders. Likewise for Edline, joining forces with Blackboard has not slowed the delivery of system enhancements one bit, as new features have recently been added. Users can expect new design layout options, a ‘quick add’ function and mobile browser access. And for those schools using both Edline and Connect platforms to manage communication efforts, a single sign-on access log-in will soon be available to better manage and maintain each system. Although a smaller district, Alton Central Schools District faces the same challenges as larger districts so they rely on the combined services of Blackboard Connect and Edline to effectively communicate with parents and the greater community. Alton Central uses Blackboard Connect to communicate rapidly with parents and the community regarding issues such as weather-related closings and delays, upcoming school events, athletics, and other school activities. Edline allows the school to provide detailed information about the district through a professionally designed, easy-to-navigate website. Together, Blackboard Connect and Edline offer a comprehensive solution to meet virtually any communications need. Visit the Blackboard Connect and Edline website to learn more about how Blackboard can enhance your K-12 school or district.

Please join me in welcoming to the Blackboard Analytics solution set our latest innovative contribution to the use of data across educational institutions, Blackboard Analytics for Learn. This new solution provides rich, easily accessible data to measure and explore student LMS activity, course design and usage, and student educational outcomes, on demand and over-time, by integrating Blackboard Learn and student information system data. At the recent Southern California Technology in Education Conference, I was asked to respond to several questions concerning analytics and the LMS: What are the barriers to better analytics around the LMS? And, what can we do across the higher education community to encourage better progress in developing LMS analytics tools? One of the primary barriers I cited was the traditional difficulty with which institutions are able to gain user friendly, attributionally rich, longitudinal data from their mission critical systems such as the student information and learning management systems. Our efforts and solutions within Blackboard Analytics are targeted exclusively at overcoming this barrier. To contribute to the educational community of practice for how LMS analytics can develop, we are pleased to make today’s announcements regarding Blackboard Analytics for Learn. As my colleague Dr. Deb Everhart blogged earlier this week, analytics from the rich activity and performance data within the LMS highlights great formative promise toward improving student academic performance and the management of the LMS. Advised by our client development partners, we’ve made specific design choices to contribute to this promise. For example, we’ve pre-built integration with the leading student information systems to ensure dimensional analysis associated with student grades, demographic attributes, and institutional departments. As with other Blackboard Analytics solutions, Blackboard Analytics for Learn extends our core approaches to both pre-built and rich data analyses and dashboards, as well as highly extensible analytics data model customization. Finally, implementation and end-user access to the Blackboard Analytics for Learn data model remains rapid and easily achievable. Last year at BbWorld, Ray Henderson announced our goal of introducing Blackboard Analytics for Learn. In reaching this goal, we are fortunate to have been advised by a group of clients whose teaching and learning through Blackboard Learn contributes greatly to their institutional objectives. In mid-2011, we launched a Product Development Partnership, a critical component of Blackboard’s development and design methodology, to work with clients who advised us on the overall set of questions we sought to answer with our analytics solution. Then, in late 2011, we partnered with three institutions which deployed our software, live, on campus, in our pre-release field trial, to utilize our Analytics for Learn solution to examine real questions on their campuses regarding student performance, course design and Blackboard Learn usage. For these partnership efforts, we are considerably thankful to Montgomery County Community College, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Grand Rapids Community College. In the coming weeks, we look forward to exploring further with our client community how Blackboard Analytics for Learn can improve student success, optimize online instruction, and contribute to the overall management of Blackboard Learn. We’ve begun actively implementing now with our next set of institutions. We look forward to exploring these initial successes and findings at the upcoming BbWorld in New Orleans in July. We’ll look forward to seeing you and continuing the conversation with you there.

I am proud to announce the 2012 Catalyst Award Winners. The Blackboard Catalyst Awards honors those who push the boundaries of their educational programs and technology in order to deliver innovative and effective learning experiences.  This year we had 61 submissions for the Catalyst Awards and 151 submissions for the Exemplary Course Award.  This represented over a 50% increase from last year’s submissions. We changed the award structure slightly; there are Platinum and Gold Winners. For the Exemplary Course Award, there were a total of 37 courses rated as exemplary but 6 winners will be awarded the ECP Director’s Choice for Courses with Distinction. We are excited to honor the winners and their achievement at the Catalyst Awards luncheon at BbWorld in July 2012. Please stay tuned as we highlight the individual winners in an upcoming blog series. And the winner are…