Sometimes, there are bugs.
This week I spent some time with Blackboard Annotate – our new tool for inline grading. On Monday. I used it for Kaltura practice and while I was doing that I realized that I had some buttons missing. I found that adding a comment pushed the document to the left and there didn’t seem to be a way to hide the comments to get the document back to a larger view. The documentation shows that there should be some buttons for panning and zooming in and out but I didn’t see them. I tried Chrome, Firefox, and even Edge. We tried three different computers at home with different browsers – no buttons.
I worked through this Annotate issue with Mike. I updated Chrome and the buttons still didn’t appear for me even after refreshing. Then I reduced the window size , expanded it again, and they showed up – but only in Chrome – and they work now. Weird. This is what it looked like without the zoom and pan options:
And this is what it is supposed to look like:
I started Tuesday with another studio (with Margaret’s help). After that I went through some Kaltura updates with Albert and practiced a few things to see the settings. Then got I the studio course(s) ready for the participants for Wednesday’s sessions.
I had three studios scheduled for Wednesday – the first two back-to-back. My first session got off to a rough start. There was something wrong in the BlueJeans room. The trouble was, it looked fine from my perspective… at first. I could see my camera but didn’t know that no one else could. Some people could respond in the chat, others couldn’t. People seemed to have trouble staying in the meeting and while it looked like cameras were on, only the squares with their initials showed up. And, there was no information in the call details. We resolved it by moving to a different BlueJeans session space and that seemed to work. I imagine there is going to be a lot more load on our systems starting next week.
Albert and I did two Kaltura sessions that went well. The second (Intermediate) one only had a few people so we ended up doing kind of a customized session to focus on what they wanted help with. This worked as they’d all been in the novice session as well. It was good to get back into practicing with Kaltura too. I didn’t get much ‘serious’ recording done this week but I made and deleted a few videos for practice and did some demonstrations for the studios . The recent update doesn’t seem to have made significant changes for our purposes. People who are new to it won’t notice anything different and those who have been using it might appreciate the new analytics (that aren’t working at the moment…). The captioning tool seems to work pretty well for the most part. I found captions on a video that I made last week when I replayed it on Monday. When I made a demo video on Wednesday I didn’t see captions right away. It didn’t occur to me until Albert suggested it, captions will take some time to show up and we don’t know how long. By the end of our session the captions had shown up on my demo video. That is information we will add to the sessions.
This feels like mostly a process/tech type reflection this week but that’s how it went. There are things outside of our control. We roll with it, and trouble shoot it, and figure it out. September is just around the corner and I think things are about to get ‘interesting’.