Academic Tech Tips

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