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Dear Faculty,<\/p>\n
We are thankful<\/strong> that the first Fall semester in our new LMS, Brightspace, has gone so smoothly, evidencing your commitment to learning the system, listening to each other, and leading students through their new \u201cclassrooms.\u201d\u00a0 We invite you to reach out to our Media Team as you work to update your course videos for the coming year, and to join the new SPS Accessibility & Inclusion Community of Practice to learn more about UDL initiatives on campus. Please take a minute or two to send us your suggestions and reflections in our Brightspace Feedback Survey — we are eager to hear and be guided by your perspectives!<\/p>\n Fall trainings for faculty continue, with upcoming sessions covering using ePortfolio and Social Annotations in your courses, navigating the Gradebook and grading in Brightspace, and exploring a variety of ways to give feedback to students using Brightspace tools. Registration links for all sessions are below, along with a link to register for the upcoming CUNY IT conference. We leave you with a cornucopia of Brightspace tips from your fellow instructors, and our best wishes for a successful conclusion of the semester!<\/p>\n The OFDIT Media Team is available to assist faculty with creating instructional video! As we approach the Spring term, now is the perfect time for faculty to update their course videos, especially with the bulk of our transition to Brightspace behind us. With the new platform in place, refreshing the standard videos (ex. course overview, welcome message, and\/or faculty introduction) is more pertinent than ever!<\/p>\n Get the Process Started! Email matthew.lewis@cuny.edu<\/a> or set up a Zoom consultation<\/a>. Or if you\u2019re coming to campus on an upcoming Tuesday, request a studio reservation<\/a>!<\/p>\n Have you noticed the announcement in Brightspace about a user feedback survey<\/a>? OFDIT is gathering feedback from faculty, students and staff about their user experience in Brightspace. We plan to use the feedback to make some adjustments for Spring courses, and to improve our training and support resources. We have heard from a good number of students, but not so much from faculty! Please take the opportunity to share<\/a> what is useful, describe where the points of friction are, and make suggestions for changes in layout, content, or configuration. Thank you!<\/p>\n From Lilly Matthew: The Pulse app is great for getting notifications about students\u2019 posts in the Q & A forum<\/strong>, so you can answer them quickly from wherever you are. Students really appreciate that kind of responsiveness, which helps them keep their momentum when they’re working on assignments. When you receive a notification on your phone, you can open it and it will take you directly into the Pulse app where you can post a quick reply.<\/p>\n To set up instant notifications:<\/p>\n After a successful inaugural meeting in October, join us for our second monthly meeting of the <\/span>Accessibility & Inclusion Community of Practice<\/b> for faculty and staff on <\/span>Friday, November 22 at 12pm ET<\/b> via Zoom. We\u2019ll discuss principles of Universal Design in Learning (UDL), brainstorm implementation ideas, and share actionable tips for creating accessible documents. <\/span>Register here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n The CoP is part of the broader <\/span>UDL Collaborative<\/a><\/strong> by the CUNY Office of Student Inclusion. As part of this effort, the CUNY Innovative Teaching Academy is offering a year-long asynchronous training course on UDL guidelines, for which you can <\/span>register here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n Friday, 11\/8,<\/b> 11:00 am-12:00 pm \u2013<\/span> CITA Book Club<\/a><\/strong> \u201cTeaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning\u201d by Jose Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson<\/span><\/p>\n Friday, 11\/22<\/b>, 11:00 am-12:00 pm\u00a0 \u2013<\/span> Supporting Students\u2019 Ethical Use of AI: Ideas and Practices in Humanities and STEM Fields<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Registration is now open for the <\/span>23rd Annual CUNY IT Conference<\/a><\/strong>, <\/span>December 5-6<\/b> at John Jay College. This year\u2019s theme is \u201cAdvancing CUNY: Intentional Connections and Smart Collaborations,\u201d with speakers including Aleks Berditchevskaia, Principal Researcher at Nesta\u2019s Center for Collective Intelligence Design.<\/span><\/p>\n SPS will be well represented with 4 presentations:<\/span><\/p>\n After many trials and tribulations, <\/span>single sign-on is available<\/b> on the <\/span>CUNY SPS OpenLab<\/a><\/strong>! If you already have an OpenLab account, you\u2019ll receive a communique to inform you that your account has been updated, signaling that you\u2019re ready to log into the OpenLab with your CUNY Login credentials. (You use these to login to Brightspace, Outlook, and CUNY First, among others.)<\/span><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve been waiting for a streamlined login experience, you can now <\/span>sign up using your CUNY Login<\/b><\/a>. <\/b>This officially makes us the first OpenLab integrated with CUNY Login!<\/span><\/p>\n OFDIT\u2019s fall trainings can help you teach, assess, and engage your students in high-impact, accessible, and efficient ways. We look forward to seeing you at some of our upcoming sessions! Refer to our trainings page on the<\/span> SPS Faculty Community Hub site<\/a><\/strong> or click links below to register.<\/span><\/p>\n In this training we will discuss how to navigate the gradebook and the options for grading in Brightspace.<\/span><\/p>\n There are many options in Brightspace for giving students feedback on their work. In this short brown-bag training, we\u2019ll go over how to give feedback on discussions, assignments, quizzes, and group assignments and show you how students access your feedback so you can guide them to making the most of it.<\/span><\/p>\n Social annotations can radically change the way your students engage with your course materials, each other, and you, combining the benefits of annotation, dialogue, accessibility, and digital accountability. In this one-hour workshop, we\u2019ll look at social annotations across a range of disciplines, platforms, and assignment types, and discuss how this practice can build students\u2019 skills, foster community, and promote intellectual growth.<\/span><\/p>\n As many of us have learned, Panopto is a handy tool to create video in Brightspace. But many of us have yet to unlock the powerful features inside it. In this session, participants will learn how to access the robust analytics showing us who watched a video and for how long. They will see how faculty can leverage the power of a low-stakes quiz with the in-video quiz tool. A video quiz can be automatically graded and mapped to your grade book. Finally, we\u2019ll demonstrate how a regular assignment can be turned into a video assignment with students as the media creators. It\u2019s all part of the Panopto platform built into Brightspace.<\/p>\n Creating engaging online courses is not easy. In many text discussion-board based courses, students feel isolated and disconnected from their instructors and classmates. VoiceThread bridges the gaps in social presence typically found in online courses. In this workshop, educators will learn how to establish a social presence and connect with their students using VoiceThread to improve course satisfaction and student learning. We will cover all of the basic VoiceThread features, demonstrate how everything works in D2L Brightspace, showcase a variety of examples from actual courses, and have an open Q&A throughout the training.<\/p>\n From Hannah Miller (LARTS):<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n When I reply to student posts in Discussion Boards, I use a \u201ctext expander\u201d to always include the same emoji and my name in the subject line of my response, e.g., \u201c\ud83c\udf3f Prof. Hannah to [Student\u2019s name].\u201d This rapidly \u201cflags\u201d my replies visually for students when they are scanning over topic responses, and allows me or students a quick way to pull up my replies by performing a search for that emoji in the Discussion Topic. I use the low-cost text expander \u201cTypeIt4Me\u201d on the Mac.<\/p>\n Submitted by Curtis Izen (BUS):<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n Recently, I needed to include a text grade item in my course that would allow me to include an \u201cIncomplete\u201d or \u201cComplete\u201d for a student submission not counted towards their final grade<\/strong>. The following steps allowed me to create text-grade item<\/strong>s:<\/p>\n If you have a pedagogical tip from your new experiences in Brightspace (in 200 words or less!) that you think might help others, we would love to hear from you and add your submission to our next Faculty Newsletter! You can use our Faculty Corner Submission Form<\/a> to submit.<\/p>\n
\nGet Support Making Instructional Videos<\/strong><\/span><\/big><\/h2>\n
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\nBrightspace Updates and Notes<\/big><\/span><\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nBrightspace Feedback Survey<\/span><\/h2>\n
Brightspace Highlight<\/span><\/h2>\n
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\nEvents and Announcements for SPS Faculty<\/span><\/big><\/h2>\n
Accessibility & Inclusion Community of Practice<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
CITA <\/span>Series on Generative AI<\/a><\/strong><\/h2>\n
CUNY IT Conference 2024<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n
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\n\u00a0CUNY SPS OpenLab Launches SSO<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
\nOFDIT Fall 2024 Trainings\u00a0<\/strong><\/big><\/span><\/h2>\n
Brightspace: Navigating the Gradebook and Grading\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n
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Brightspace: Feedback (30 minutes)<\/b><\/h3>\n
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The Pedagogy of Social Annotations<\/b><\/h3>\n
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Advanced Panopto for SPS Faculty<\/h3>\n
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Humanize Your Online Course with VoiceThread<\/h3>\n
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\nFaculty Corner<\/big><\/span><\/h2>\n
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