How to save time online
MSB G61 12.00-2pm Monday July 7th
All academic staff from the School of Biological Sciences are invited to this free, hands-on event.
No need to book, just turn up.
Program:
Alan Cann: How to find the research paper you need without looking for it
Chris Willmott: Knowing where it’s at - find it? flag it? share it?
Joanne Badge: Beyond “Track Changes” to collaborative writing
Stuart Johnson: Organising your online world

Come and join an experimental social network site for the Centre for Bioscience. As you will know, online Social networks and ‘Web 2.0′ technologies have grown significantly recently and we wish to explore their potential, without wasting your time or ours. With this in mind I have set up a simple social network using Ning (a popular social network host) as a potential service provider.

http://heabio.ning.com

Email Jo Badge for an invitation

The new version of Blackboard 8 coming for 2008/9 has a complete redesigned gradebook. Take a look at the short video below to see the main features in action.

It includes:

• direct grade entries on the spreadsheet (no more clicking through 3 pages to get to an netry point)
• direct email to students or groups of students from the gradebook (and a record that you have emailed them!!! FINALLY!)
• easy to enter eFeedback for each student

Tags: blackboard, news

ITS intend to move directly to Blackboard Version 8 (missing out version 7.3) for the next academic year. A test system with your current course content will be available sometime in August with a view to a final upgrade in September.

The main changes are:

• New version of the Gradecentre (a completely reworked gradebook)
• Blackboard’s discussion boards have been redesigned to include options for tree view
• Content Collection will have a recycle bin from which deleted items can be restored.
• course links into the Content Collection are preserved when courses are copied.
• Visual Text Box Editor (VTBE) support for Mac users
• Windows Vista and Office 2007 compatible

Tags: blackboard, news

If you have ever wanted to add a colleague, postgrad student or other cfs user to your Blackboard site, but wanted to make sure that they didn’t see the student gradebook or couldn’t mess up your content, then check this document to see which role will limit the activities of your user.

BbUserroles via kwout

Forms for the return of project marks are available on the Board of Examiners Blackboard site. If you do not have access to this link, contact Jo Badge for registration.

The deadline for Degree Stream Project Coordinators to return

1. Completed spreadsheets of moderated marks,
2. Both copies of each project dissertation and
3. Hard copies of completed and signed sheets A and B for each project to the School Office.

is the 21st May 2008.

Zetoc is the electronic table of contents service from the British Library. The British library is a copyright library, so receives copies of just about anything you can think and many that you can’t. You may already use Zetoc email alerts, which sends an email to you containing results from saved search terms. Another option is to get the Electronic table of contents direct to your browser, so you can have the latest issues from Nature genetics or Cell automatically appear in your browser. To do this, use Zetoc: RSS and an RSS aggregator and go and look for your favourite journals.

A good place to start with RSS is by looking at ‘what the heck is RSS ?’

Tags: how_to, RSS, web2.0

The School of Biological Sciences standard end of module questionnaire is available as a Blackboard survey which can be customised for your course. Contact Jo Badge to get a copy for your course. Information on how to extract the data from the questionnaire and present it as rank scores is available, including an example excel file to use.

Anyone classed as a blog editor on the Biological Sciences School office Blackboard Site can add new postings. These are available as ‘headlines’ to students outside Blackboard if they use an RSS reader (this is something that first year students in 2008/9 will be introduced to in BS1010).

This short video demonstrates how to add items to the blog. If you cannot see the student blog on your Blackboard page, please contact Jo Badge

Using the Biological Sciences School Office site, you can send email to students in the school by year of entry and degree stream, or combine these groups to send email to all the students in a year.

This short video shows exactly how to do this.

If you cannot access the ’staff only’ menu item on the blackboard site, please contact Jo Badge.