A channel for news and release updates, related to each of our product platforms and service offerings as well as best practices and insights shared by our product team and clients.
As we recover from last week’s BbWorld 2010 whirlwind, we’d like to take a moment to highlight a great accomplishment as Blackboard was recently featured on the Dominican Republic’s presidential blog. At this year’s Virtual Educa conference, held at Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo (UASD), Blackboard’s International President, Juan Lucca, hosted a workshop for attendees on “How to Achieve the Campus of the 21st century: Mobile Technology and Education of Today with Blackboard Connect and Blackboard Mobile” (“Cómo lograr el campus del siglo XXI: tecnología móvil y educación de hoy con Blackboard Connect y Blackboard Mobile”). In leading the discussion, Lucca spoke on the importance of providing “equitable access to secondary and higher education” to students of Latin American countries by “reducing socio-economic and ethnic inequities,” while focusing on the most important goals in education. More importantly, Lucca said, as mobile computing steadily gains prominence within educational space, Latin American institutions can overcome significant challenges to best serve and meet the increasingly digital needs of students by utilizing tools such as Blackboard Connect and Blackboard Mobile.
In our second installment of the Blackboard Connect social media integration feature spotlight, we turn to Dundee, MI who uses Blackboard Connect, in conjunction with their Facebook page, to respond to severe weather.
The Village of Dundee,
Michigan is about 30 minutes away from Ann Arbor and has a population of about
4,000 residents. The community launched a Facebook
page in November of last year, and it has already been “liked”
by more than 1,400 fans.
It’s increasingly
evident the important role social media plays in everyday life. From the
mundane to the catastrophic, events are being reported by peers
minute-by-minute, as they happen. According to the Pew
Internet & American Life Project, “one-third
(35 percent) of American adult Internet-users have a profile on an online
social network site.”
Sites like Facebook and Twitter present new avenues to connect
and exchange information, so it’s
no surprise more users are logging on every day. That growing audience is one
reason social media is quickly becoming a mainstream platform for
forward-looking school administrators and government officials that want to establish
relationships and maintain open conversations with community members.
This week, we announced the availability
of Blackboard Mobile Learn for Android, Blackberry and iPhoneOS, making the
mobile learning app available on the most popular smartphones devices.
Blackboard Mobile Learn, which was first announced for the iPad
in April, recreates the Blackboard learning experience for students and
teachers from anywhere. A lot of work went into the development of each of
these native applications and for a more detailed perspective on that process,
check out this recent blog post from Kayvon on The
Mobile Garage.
If you want to see these mobile apps in action, check out
these demos for Android,
BlackBerry
and iPhoneOS
. We’re really excited about these innovations and look forward to hearing
your thoughts on this blog and next month at BbWorld!
When
it comes to teaching and learning, everyone has their own style and approach to
gathering, presenting and consuming information. Having the ability to
personalize the environment in which you are working to fit your own needs and
style can help simplify the experience and allow you to find what you are
looking for and complete your task much faster.
The
work coming out of the IMS
Access for All group is about allowing a user to define personal
preferences for how they need to interact with a system, and ensuring the
content available to them has the right meta-data to accommodate these
preferences. Imagine a world in which students are presented with content in
the manner best suited to their needs at any given time. While there is some
argument about the value of user and accessibility preferences (see Jared
Smith's recent article titled: Web
Accessibility Preferences Are For Sissies?) there is definitely a balance
that needs to be maintained to ensure the best experience for all users.
