Ready! Le’ts go! Got right back into workshops on Tuesday morning. That was a good way to start. I spent some time on Monday getting ready and catching up on last week’s email. Monday wasn’t an official work day but I needed to make up some time and I wanted to feel ready to go on Tuesday.
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were all Blackboard studio sessions in the mornings. It was almost like we had a cohort going through them which was nice. most of the same people came for all three days. Some had to leave early because they were also enrolled in course re-design sprint but they told me they came back to the studio course to practice so that was good to know.
I had been meaning to ask Mike about an upgrade to our Blackboard assignment feedback tool (Blackboard Annotate). We’ve both been on varying stages of vacation and haven’t connected as much as usual. We were expecting to have Annotate back in June. Well, it’s here now. I discovered it during a studio session on assignments. It looks much more robust than the older version and I will spend some time exploring it and will probably create a screen cast for it as part of my Kaltura practice. I’ll also see if there is a hand out that needs updating.
It turns out that there is a pretty good hand out from Blackboard showing the tools and features, and a short video. I had some time Thursday afternoon to look over the features while I was waiting for an instructor to show up in BlueJeans. I made one screen cast of Blackboard Annotate – it’s not great, but the point was to practice and it was good for that. I lost my Kaltura controls – that’s never happened to me before – and I couldn’t end it. I’ll keep experimenting until it’s smooth.
We have a Kalutra upgrade coming Monday so next week will be getting familiar with that before the studios on Wednesday. I’m going to get familiar with it by creating as many screen casts and videos as I can (between other things) until it starts to feel easy.