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A lot is changing in the technology industry around us. Every new development that we hear of centers around the ability to develop plugins and extensions to enhance the user experience. From our social presence on the Facebook® platform to our iGoogle™ homepages to our web browsers to our mobile phones,  those technologies we use on a daily basis are customizable in ways that increase productivity, usability, and even utility.

For many institutions the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), save perhaps webmail, is arguably the most-used campus system. Over the past decade, we’ve seen the VLE emerge as a toolkit of technologies that instructors can use to enhance the virtual education experience.

Education, too, is filled with an ever-increasing variety of systems and technologies that can be used to teach, learn, collaborate, and connect. It is important that schools and individual instructors have the flexibility to ensure that teaching and learning can be more impactful, more meaningful, and more supportive of new tools, technologies, and approaches.

This is exactly the reason why Blackboard is committed to openness.

If your institution wants to learn more about how to use your existing Blackboard Learn platform to support your faculty’s unique needs, let us speak geek with your developers at DevCon ’09. The DevCon program will talk about the Blackboard Building Blocks plugin and extension framework and address a wide variety of topics, all of which will help you match Blackboard Learn capabilities to your institution.  For example:

“If only we had a way to…”

Learn to develop Blackboard Building Blocks as a beginner or advanced developer so you can just build or integrate the tools your faculty want and need.

“I really want to know more about open source educational tools…

Learn how to find open source tools that plug into the Blackboard Learn platform and find your place in a community of open source educational tool developers.

“How can I get my lesson plan content into Blackboard?”

Softchalk will explain how their Lesson Builder integrates with the Blackboard Learn platform via a Blackboard Building Block to allow faculty to publish content straight to their Blackboard Learn system.

“What if I want to run Blackboard Learn software and Sakai to meet my e-Learning needs?”

Learn to use the Learning Environment Connector to integrate the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment with Blackboard Learn Release 9.

Check out the full program and see how many of the sessions remind you of requests your team has received from your faculty.  Then join us at DevCon to share information and best practices. These two days of technical sessions can set your institution down a path for continued success and innovation.