ITS Technology Tips

If you’ve ever lost your work when typing in an online form, posting content to Blackboard or writing webmail, then you know how frustrating it can be!  Next time you can prevent this inconvenience by installing a very helpful Firefox add-on, Lazarus: Form Recovery. Lazarus automatically saves the text you have entered in a form, blog response or even an email and allows you to easily recover your work.  

After installing Lazarus, all you have to do to recover text in a Web document is return to the Web page and right-click on the field where you lost the data. You will have the option to recover text or to recover a form depending on what you need. After you select an option, the text is automatically re-entered.  You can also keep your data secure by setting Lazarus to require a password to restore your forms.

How to Make Your Course Available to Students

Remember that students cannot see their course titles in Blackboard, even if they are registered for the course and their name appears on the roster, unless instructors make the course available.  You must manually make the course available in the Course Options settings in the Control Panel; complete instructions are at http://www.luc.edu/itrs/teachingwithtechnology/blackboard/course_available.shtml.

For more Blackboard instructions check out the, Blackboard@Loyola Help Resources page.

Adding audio comments provides a method for instructors to give verbal feedback when grading electronic documents.  The embedded audio features in Adobe Acrobat Professional allow users to record comments directly into a PDF document.  Instructors would need a license of Adobe Acrobat Professional and a computer microphone to convert files to PDF and record audio.  Students would only need the free version of Acrobat Reader to access the commented files.  For more information about purchasing Adobe Acrobat Professional visit ITS’ Technology Purchases page. 

Resources: 
NIU – Using Audio Feedback to Promote Teaching Presence

With Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, large files are almost always caused by images.  You might have high resolution digital photos from your digital camera that you’ve inserted, high quality scans, or uncompressed graphics all throughout your file. Reducing file size helps alleviate complications later such as your colleague not being able to open your email attachment or lengthy download times.  If you have a Word or PowerPoint file containing images that you plan to attach in an email or post to Blackboard then it’s worth compressing the images within your document.

PC users

There is a built-in option for compressing all of your images at once in Office 2003 and 2007.  Follow these steps to compress your image in Word 2003/2007 and PowerPoint 2003.

1. Right-click on a picture, then click Format Picture on the shortcut menu.
2. In the Format dialog box, click the Picture tab, and then click Compress.
3. Under Apply to, click All pictures in document.
4. Under Change resolution, click Web/Screen.
5. Under Options, select the Compress pictures check box and the Delete cropped areas of pictures check box.
6. Click OK.
7. If prompted, click Apply in the Compress Pictures dialog box.

If you are using PowerPoint 2007, the steps vary slightly:

1. Single-click on a picture, then click the Format tab from the menu options on the upper right.
2. Click the Compress Images button on the upper left.

Mac Users

Microsoft Office does not have a built in compression feature for the Mac. However, if your image files are too big, consider converting them to JPG. You can easily convert images on a Mac by opening them in the Finder and saving them to the JPG format. You can also lessen the quality to reduce file size when you save images from the Finder.  You can also use any photo-editing program such as Photoshop to reduce the size of an image.  If you do not have a program like Photoshop installed on your computer, see a previous Tech Tip on free photo-editing tools.

If you have pictures that you’d like to share, instead of emailing individual photos or posting many images to your Blackboard course, consider creating a movie slideshow. With QuickTime Pro software, you can easily create a movie slideshow from a folder of images.   While you may have the free QuickTime Player already installed on your computer, updating to QuickTime Pro ($29.99/Mac or PC) will enable you to create a nice-looking movie presentation of your photos.

Learn how to create a slideshow movie in QuickTime in just a few steps:  http://images.apple.com/quicktime/pdf/QuickTime7_User_Guide.pdf

Quick Tip

Try saving your PowerPoint presentation as JPEG images.  If you have a large PowerPoint file with many images, saving your presentation as JPEG images, then creating a slideshow movie from the PowerPoint JPEGs will significantly reduce the size.  Additionally, the movie file will be read-only and will display nicely on a Web page or Blackboard course page.

For this week’s tech tip, we offer timely and important information for instructors who are using the Blackboard Grade Center.  With the end of the semester drawing near, it is essential to keep a copy of your Grade Center. Downloading the Grade Center each time you enter new grades is a good way to maintain a backup of your Grade Center in case Blackboard becomes inaccessible. Excel also offers more complex mathematical functions than Blackboard’s Grade Center. If you download the Grade Center to Excel to do additional grade calculations, you will then need to upload the grades back into Blackboard. You’ll only need to follow the steps for downloading if you just wish to keep a backup of your grades.   For complete instructions on how to back up your Grade Center, visit the link to instructions below.  For more help documentation on the Grade Center, visit the Grade Center Help page.

Instructions:  Backing up your Grade Center

Grade Center Help Page

With Audacity, free downloadable recording software that works on both Macs and PCs, you’re able to easily record audio tracks and seamlessly edit clips together. Whether you’d like to create a podcast, narrate content to post to Blackboard or convert music files, audio recording software is incredibly useful to have around. Audacity has many easy-to-use features, such as editing via cut, copy and paste, noise removal, volume fading and multi-track mixing.

If you post audio files to Blackboard, make sure they are in a compressed, high-quality format, like MP3. In order to export your audio file to MP3 from Audacity, you will need to install the free LAME MP3 encoder.

In addition to Audacity being free and cross-platform there are many helpful resources, such as tutorials and FAQ’s, available at Audacity’s website.

Over the summer, Loyola’s Information Technology & Services upgraded Blackboard from version 7.3 to version 8.0, just in time for the Fall 2008 semester. While this is a major upgrade, the interface has not changed (except for the Grade Center). So we should be able to do everything we could do with 7.3 without taking a lot of time to learn Blackboard over again.

A Better Blackboard — New Features

•  New Grade Center – Interactive view, Self-assessment and Peer Review
•  Scholar- a free, innovative social bookmarking Web service, aimed at connecting faculty and students
•  Podcasting – deliver a series of audio or video files to students
•  New language access
•  Adaptive Release – control when information is released and which students or groups can receive it
•  Live Classroom video – Students see their professor teaching in real-time or archive
•  Performance improvements and program fixes have been added

Please direct any questions or concerns about this upgrade to Blackboard@luc.edu.

Continue to check the Faculty Documentation page for instructions on using the new features.