Category: Uncategorized

September 27, 2016

Turnitin available in Blackboard! And: Join us for a training.

With both Turnitin as well as SafeAssign available now, SPS faculty have more options for creating and checking writing assignments for originality within your Blackboard sites.

SafeAssign was recently integrated into the Blackboard Assignments interface. To use SafeAssign, simply tick the box in the “Submission Details” section of a regular Blackboard assignment.

You may already know Turnitin from using it outside of Blackboard. It is now available CUNY-wide through Blackboard, as a separate assignment type in the Assessments dropdown menu.

A Turnitin assignment is fully integrated with Blackboard: students access it like any other assignment in your course, and you can view and grade assignments directly in your course site. Turnitin differs from SafeAssign primarily in that it has a much larger database, including billions of web pages and hundreds of millions of journals, periodicals, books, and student papers against which it compares students’ submissions for plagiarism.

Turnitin offers a user-friendly inline grading function, called Feedback Studio, where you can leave voice and text comments, markup papers with comments or “QuickMarks” (i.e. preset comments with explanations that you can customize to fit your needs and insert into students’ assignments), as well as Turnitin-specific rubrics or checklists for grading.

Also included are functions such as Revision Assignment, which allows you to create assignments with multiple drafts; and PeerMark Assignments, which give students an opportunity to participate in peer review, with Turnitin managing the distribution of papers for review according to settings you choose.

Here are the steps to replacing existing Blackboard assignments with Turnitin:

Copy the assignment’s instructions and take note of its settings (e.g., in a Word document).
Delete the existing assignment from your course site.
Recreate it as a Turnitin Paper Assignment by hovering over Assessments > Turnitin Assignment. Paste the assignment instructions you had copied, and check all Optional Settings for accuracy.
Remember to make these changes in both your dev and live site.

Note: Turnitin assignments are automatically created in a grading category called Turnitin Assignment. If you use a Weighted Total column to calculate the final grade, be sure to change it to include the Turnitin Assignment category, or change the category of your Turnitin Assignment in the Grade Center.

Some useful resources for learning more about Turnitin:

A great guide created by our colleagues at Lehman College.
Turnitin has a support site for the Basic Blackboard integration that we currently use at CUNY, which includes a downloadable pdf of the Instructor Manual.

There is still time to sign up for our upcoming online Turnitin training sessions. Please join us on one of the following dates:
Tuesday, September 27 at 6pm
Thursday, October 6 at 3pm
Tuesday, October 18 at 12pm

Looking forward to working with you!

Antonia, Sarah, and Krystyna

April 7, 2015

Faculty Development Day 2015

Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners: Incorporating Universal Design and Adult Learning Principles into our Teaching

Friday, April 24, 2015

For Faculty Development Day 2015 we have chosen to address two topics related to supporting our learners: adult learning principles and universal design in online/hybrid learning.

At SPS, we have a high percentage of adult learners. A greater awareness of adult learning principles can enable faculty to make teaching and learning more effective and stimulating for our students.

The goal of universal design in education is making learning spaces – rooms as well as online courses – foster learning for diverse learners of different capabilities, abilities, and preferences. This means that we not only try to eliminate barriers, but actually strive to find approaches that will make learning effective for all learners. For example, adding captions to a video may help a student who is blind, but it may also enhance the learning of a student who can read what is being said rather than simply watching. While accessibility issues may seem a specialized area, all faculty can benefit from knowing how universal design principles can be incorporated into course design and content preparation.

Our early morning session will focus on adult learning principles while our lunchtime panel of faculty, students and staff will introduce and then address issues of universal design in online/hybrid courses. We will again offer labs in morning and afternoon on two topics. One lab will provide a hands-on opportunity for faculty to learn how to apply universal design principles to both the design of their course sites as well as the format of course materials. The other lab will focus on the Content Collection in Blackboard, specifically on how to organize and manage your course content area folders, and how to collaborate and share content with other faculty.

Faculty Development Day will take place at 119 West 31^st St., Friday April 24^th from 9am – 3:30pm. This on-site event is open to and appropriate for all SPS faculty, whether teaching face-to-face, online or hybrid courses. Faculty are welcome to attend any or all sessions during the day, but we ask you to register and to indicate your preferred lab session and whether you are joining us for lunch, so that we are able to accommodate as many faculty as possible.

SCHEDULE

9 – 9.15 am	Coffee and check-in	Room 407, 4^th floor

9.15 – 9.30 am	Greetings	Room 407, 4^th floor

9.30 – 10.30 am	Plenary Session: “Adult Learning Principles” Discussion and hands-on activity	Room 407, 4^th floor

10.30 – 10.45 am	Break

10.45 – 11.55 am Morning Labs	(1) Designing an Accessible Online Course or (2) Introduction to the Content Collection in Blackboard	Room 322, 3rd floorRoom 306, 3rd floor
12 – 2 pm	Lunch & Lunch Panel (from 12.15 – 1.45pm) “Perspectives on Universal Design and Accessibility in Online /Hybrid Courses”	Room 407, 4^th floor

2 – 3.30 pm Afternoon Labs	(1) Designing an Accessible Online Course or (2) Introduction to the Content Collection in Blackboard	Room 322, 3rd floorRoom 306, 3rd floor

Questions, please contact Susan Ko: susan.ko@mail.cuny.edu

February 4, 2014

Faculty Development Day 2014

Raising the Bar: New Approaches and Tools for Teaching and Learning

March 28, 2014

Hold the date of March 28, 2014 and register below for our faculty development day workshop event organized around the theme of continuous innovation and improvement of instruction. Activities will include a morning plenary session, a lunchtime panel, a lab session to get better acquainted with some features of Blackboard Enhanced and another lab to explore various multimedia tools for your courses. You can attend as many sessions as you like at our new offices at 119 West 31st St. during the 9:00-3:30 pm schedule.

Our morning plenary session will set the stage for the day’s events as we consider the how and the why of new approaches and tools for teaching and learning. As part of our lunchtime panel, “What are students telling us about the course experience?” we will have a chance to hear some feedback on the course experience from students and those staff who engage with students in a variety of contexts, and to discuss faculty perspectives on these issues. In the labs (each of the two is offered in morning and afternoon sessions), faculty will have an opportunity to explore some special features of Blackboard Enhanced and to become familiar with a number of multimedia and interactive tools that the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology will be supporting.

This on-site event is open to and appropriate for all SPS faculty, whether teaching face-to-face, online or hybrid courses. Faculty are welcome to attend any or all sessions during the day, but we ask you to register and to indicate your preferred lab session and whether you are joining us for lunch, so that we are able to accommodate as many faculty as possible.

Where: 119 West 31^st St, 4^th floor (registration checkin, plenary session and lunch) and 3^rd floor computer labs, t.b.a.

SCHEDULE

9:00-9:25 am	Welcome and Introduction
9:30-10:45 am	Plenary Session: “New Approaches for Student Engagement in Online Learning” Discussion and hands-on activity
10:45-10:55 am	Coffee Break
11 am-12:25 pm Morning Labs	Blackboard Enhanced: Managing your course more effectively and efficiently OR Multimedia and Interactive Tools
12:30-1:50 pm	Lunch 12:30 Panel starts 12:45
2:00-3:30 pm Afternoon Labs	Blackboard Enhanced: Managing your course more effectively and efficiently OR Multimedia and Interactive Tools