Bloated PowerPoints Are Not “Green”

Uploading oversized PowerPoint slideshows require more time on the computer and requires more storage space (on the student’s computer as well as on the ANGEL server). Bloated PowerPoint slides also take longer to load for a presentation. How do you get bloated files? The easiest method is to simply drag graphic images onto a PowerPoint slide without resizing, trimming or compressing. With the Clean Out Your Office days just past, let’s not forget that every little “green” effort is magnified and can make a difference.

Here’s how you can encourage your students to create more efficient slideshows. The first step is simply to crop unnecessary parts of the images used in PowerPoint in order to further reduce the file size. That can be accomplished within PowerPoint itself (right-click the image, select Size and Position and on the Size tab, use the Crop settings to remove portions of the image from the left, right, top of bottom).

However, the most important step in PowerPoint (2002, XP, 2003 and 2007) is to use the built-in compression (of images) feature. To use it, complete these steps, which once you walk through it once, you’ll find are simpler than the number of steps would indicate):

1. Click on any picture in your presentation.


2. You will see the Picture Tools > Format options appear (upper left corner of PowerPoint 2007) as shown below.
   
   
   Click on the Compress Pictures icon shown above.


3. You will see the Compress Pictures Dialog box. To compress all pictures, leave the Apply to Selected Pictures Only check box unchecked.


4. You can also reduce the file size further by selecting the Options button, which displays the Compression Settings dialog box.
   
   Next your students would select the Print, Screen or E-mail option to reduce quality further (to match intended use).


5. When done with settings on the Compression Settings dialog box, click OK.


6. Next, click OK on the Compress Pictures dialog box.


7. Finally, use File > Save as..." to save your presentation with a new filename (if you want to retain the higher quality version) and add descriptive text such as "For Review" or "Compressed” to the end of the filename. The student should keep the original PowerPoint file, or at least the original images, in case they wish to edit the pictures again.
   I used this process to shrink a 1.09 MB file (had three images on three slides) down to 339 KB (images were compressed using the Screen option). Using the E-mail option would have reduced the file size further.

• There is an additional way or two to reduce the file size of a PowerPoint slideshow.
  
  If you have Microsoft Office installed, you’ll also have access to an application called Picture Manager, a handy tool for cropping, scaling and compressing images singly or in batches. The Picture Manager can be accessed from the Start Menu by selecting All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Picture Manager. If students get their images to the sizes they actually need before inserting them into PowerPoint, the resulting presentation will be much smaller. Picture Manager comes with Office, so there’s no extra expense. Things like Google’s Picasa will do the same thing.


• If students are including videos, they should try to embed the video via YouTube, Vimeo or similar site, rather than insert the video.

Student Tracking Reports in ANGEL

If you want to use student tracking in ANGEL, turn it on before any student activity occurs. For JCCC's setup we've, by default, turned off tracking for each course, each semester. Tracking only begins to work after it is enabled. If tracking is turned on at some point after student activity begins, any reports will appear faulty for dates prior to the date and time when tracking was enabled.

By the way, you can turn on tracking at the folder level and that setting will cascade to all items within the folder. Turning on tracking for an entire folder of items is a lot easier than going to each individual item in the folder to enable tracking.

It’s also important to note that if a user exits ANGEL by closing their browser (as opposed to logging off using the ANGEL ‘Power’ button), ANGEL will not accurately record the tracking data for the student in that session.

ANGEL Tip: Copying and Pasting Questions from Word into ANGEL

Do you have paper exams that you wrote in Word and you wish there was an easy way to get them into ANGEL? Well, there is!

The first step is to get your exam into the proper format. Make sure you don’t have any headers or other info in your exam (that is, in the Word document). Each question should begin with a number and a period, followed by the question text. Then each answer option should be on its own line and begin with a letter and a period. On the next line, you type “ANSWER:” followed by the correct answer. Then skip a line and begin the next question. For example:

1. What is a baby llama called?
A. kid
B. cria
C. calf
D. foal
ANSWER: B

Once you have your exam in this format, highlight the whole exam and copy it to your clipboard (right-click > Copy or CTRL-C). Log in to ANGEL and go to your course. Create an assessment and click on Add Question. Choose Copy and Paste Questions. Delete the default text (in the box at the top of the screen) and paste in your exam (right-click > Paste or CTRL-V). Change the number of points in the Default Settings to the desired number of points per question and then click OK.

If your exam was formatted correctly, you will see all the questions appear on your exam. If there were errors in your formatting, the process will fail and you will need to discover where the errors in your file are.

Note: You can also start each question in your Word file with a “Q:” rather than a number and a period, but this is not required. If your questions are numbered, don’t change them all to Q’s!

Just for emphasis, you can either begin each question with “Q:” or a number followed by a period, such as “1.” But, there’s no need to change it to a Q, but if you do please note that the Q needs to be followed by a colon rather than a period.

In most cases you’ll use the optional ANSWER and POINTS settings, the other optional settings are rarely used.

If you get an error message, the most common cause is extra spaces (such as putting two spaces between the letter of a choice and the text, such as “a. answer choice”) or an extra carriage return between questions (there should only be one blank line between the end of one question and the beginning of the next, and no blank lines between the question text and the answer choices for that question).

Just for clarity: Your questions can be in a Word or other text document and the text of each question should conform to the following specifications.

1. Each question should begin on a new line.
2. The first line of each question should start with 'Q:' or the question number followed by a period ('1.', 2.', '3.', etc.).
3. If the question has choices the choices should immediately follow the question text.
4. Each choice should be on a line by itself.
5. Each choice should begin with a choice letter followed by a period ('A.', 'B.', 'C.', etc.).

There are optional settings that may be added to add the number of points, include an image, or feedback. Fort details, check the iTeach Online ANGEL manual or check the online Help under assessments.

ANGEL Tip – IMPORTANT! Do not use Copy Course mid-semester!

Your source course is a great place to develop your courses. You can experiment and rearrange and develop your course, and then use Copy Course to copy it into your production (live) course before the start of the semester.

Once the semester has begun, you want to work directly in the production course! If you add content to your source course and then use Copy Course to copy it to your production course, you will overwrite all student work and grades in your production course. To avoid this, work directly in your production course. If you have more than one section of your course, you can use Utilities > Export Item to copy an item to your other courses.

At the end of the semester, you can use Copy Course to copy your production course back into your source course so that it retains the most recent version of your course. You can then change dates and make any other updates you need for next semester, and then use Copy Course to copy it to your new production courses BEFORE the beginning of the semester.

ANGEL Tip – Copying Your Gradebook Settings

If you need to copy your Gradebook settings from one course or section to another, but you don’t want to copy the whole course, you can use a handy tool called the Copy Gradebook Settings tool.

Go to a course that does NOT already have your Gradebook set up. Click on the Manage tab and then on the Gradebook link. Then click on the Preferences link. At the top of this screen, there is a link to the Copy Gradebook Settings tool. Click on the link.

Be sure you are in a course that does NOT already have the settings you want! Note the warning text at the top of the screen: “This tool will erase current settings and replace them with settings from the selected course. Use with caution! There is no way to get back your settings after replacing them.”

From the drop-down menu, choose the course that has the Gradebook settings that you want. Select which items you want to copy (you probably want to select all of them). Click the Copy Settings button. That’s it – you’re done!

Thanks to Tracy Newman for writing up this tip.

ANGEL Tip: Students Not Seeing Their Grades

When students complain that they cannot see their grades in ANGEL, check the Release Date for all of your Categories in the Gradebook. The Release Date in the Gradebook is the date that you want the grades available to students. This automatically defaults to the day and time when you made the category so grades are immediately available. However, if you changed the date or were experimenting with settings, you may have changed this date accidentally.

To change the date so that students can see their grades, go to Manage > Gradebook > Categories. Select all of your categories using the checkboxes on the left. Click the Edit Selected button and check the box for Release Date. The date should then appear for the current day and time. Click Save. This will change the setting for all Categories at once, which you will be able to confirm by looking at the table of categories.

ANGEL Tip: Using Question Banks

Building a Question Bank is a great tool for creating better assessments for your courses. Think of a Question Bank as a place to store all of your questions from semester to semester. You can create your own questions, or you can upload test banks from your publisher. When creating assessments, you can then pick and choose which questions from your Question Bank you want to include on each assessment.

When creating a Question Bank that you are going to use from semester to semester, you will want to create this Question Bank in your Personal LOR. Every course you are teaching will have access to your LOR, so you will be able to use those questions in any course for any semester.

If you already have an extensive Question Bank in one of your production courses or your Source Course, you can copy the questions into your Question Bank in your LOR.

Note: Sometimes access to your LOR becomes disconnected for some or all of your courses. If this happens, you can reestablish communication between your courses and your LOR by going to the Manage tab in your LOR, clicking on Course and Group Access, clicking on My Courses, then checking the box for all of your courses and choosing the Add Selected button.

Thanks to Tracy Newman for the tip.

The Case of the Multiplying “About This Section” Nugget

We’ve had a couple cases where the About This Section nugget on the Course Home Page is duplicated and cannot be easily deleted. In working with ANGEL support, they’ve been able to cure the problem. We asked Angel support if there was any information we could forward to our faculty regarding the editing of the About This Section nugget so the duplication would not happen again. Here is what they shared:

“I'd encourage your faculty to only use the HTML toolbar to modify this area. I saw that there was some color that (had been) added and I couldn't locate a way to do that in the HTML toolbar. I believe this may have been the issue. If (course editors will) just use plain text they should be fine here.”

Serendipity: One Sentence Statement on Teaching

From the Professional & Organization Development Network in Higher Education [POD@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] distribution list: There are moments when serendipity reigns and you don't ask questions. This morning, getting myself deeper into the groove for the Lilly-South conference on teaching in higher education in Greensboro this weekend, sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee, I opened my e-mail box. As I scrolled down and exercised my forefinger on the delete key, I came to a message. Its subject heading caught my eye, "Be Short." Intrigued, I opened it. It was from a university professor. She didn't tell me anything about herself. I'm not sure if the question she threw at me in her short message was hurled as a snide challenge or offered as a prayerful plea. Anyway, she tersely wrote, "I don't have time to read your lengthy epistles however I enjoy the very few I do copy and later read. I just want you to give me one sentence that sums up your attitude about teaching. That's all the time I have for." One sentence! A few words! A couple seconds read! Interesting.

Challenging! That beats in spades the five minute soliloquy my dear friend Todd Zakrajsek of my beloved UNC gives some of us at the Lilly-North conference. Well, to paraphrase the Bard, all things are ready if our hearts, soul, and mind be so. I guess mine had been readied for this as I've been reading myself mentally and spiritually to mix with and learn from some very neat people at the Lilly-South conference.

As it turned out, and here is where serendipity poked its nose into my affairs, before I had turned on my computer, before I had brewed a pot of coffee, I had, as I do every morning, blindly put my hand into my cat-in-the-hat hat and pulled out a word from the heap of what I call "resilient word for the day" that lay hidden at the bottom. Each morning, I go through this ritual to get the word that I plan and struggle to embody that day. Today, as serendipity would have it, the word I had selected was "amazed." Amazing!

Again, sometimes you just don't ask.

So, I read the message again, slowly; took another sip of coffee, slowly; looked at my word, slowly; and, my fingers started dancing on the keyboard, quickly: "Don't be afraid to be amazed by each student and don't be afraid to be amazing." One sentence. A reduction, as my son, Robby, the chef, would say, intensifying the flavor! How about that! I'll let her think about this one. I'll let me think about this one. Now, I'm off to live my own word all this weekend: to be fearlessly and unabashedly both amazed and amazing at Lilly-South.

Make it a good day.

Louis Schmier, Department of History, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, Georgia 31698, http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org .

ANGEL Gradebook Tip: Points Versus Percentage

There is a lot of confusion about the ANGEL Gradebook modes called Points and Percentage. When you set up your grade book in ANGEL, you need to choose which grading scheme you will be using (Manage tab > Gradebook > Preferences > Gradebook Mode drop-down).

Points means that you assign a certain number of points to each activity in your class, then add up these points and divide by the total points possible to get each student’s final grade.

Percentage should actually be called weighted average. If you choose the Percentage mode, you assign a certain weight to each category of activities in your class, such as exams, homework, etc. When you do this, it does not matter how many points each activity is worth – the points in each category will be totaled and then weighted by the factor that you designate.

Note that even if you are using Points as your grading scheme, student grades can (and will) be expressed as a percentage. If a student gets 90 out of 100 on an exam, that’s still a 90% no matter which grading scheme you are using!

Thanks to Tracy Newman for the tip.

ANGEL Tip – Essay, Short Answer, and Fill in the Blank Questions

There are 10 different types of questions you can use in an ANGEL assessment, but three of these question types must be graded manually (that means you!) while the others are graded automatically in ANGEL. Of these three manually graded question types, the most commonly used are:

1. Short Answer
2. Essay

For these types of questions, the student must type an answer into a text field. After submitting the assessment, the rest of the questions will be graded, but any short answer and/or essay questions will be left ungraded until you go in and grade them. After you grade them, the score for the assessment will be totaled and entered into the grade book.

You can grade these types of questions by going to the assessment and clicking on the Utilities link. Then select Grade by Question . You will see a list of submissions and can click on each one to grade the questions. You can either leave student names hidden, or display student names to see whose answer you are grading.

Note: Fill in the Blank questions can be graded automatically by ANGEL! You can enter answer options that you will accept as correct, but you must be very careful that you type your options exactly. Be especially careful about spaces, capitalization, and punctuation. You can enter more than one option for each blank. For instance, if the answer is “dog” but you will also accept “canine” or “K-9”, you can enter each choice as a correct option for that blank.

Thanks to Tracy Newman, Sr. Ed. Tech. Center Analyst at JCCC for this tip.

ANGEL Tip: Dropping the Lowest Grade

In the ANGEL Grade Book if you choose to drop the lowest grade, by using the “Drop Lowest” option for a Category, you may still want to see which grade was dropped (the ANGEL Grade Book does not show which grade was dropped). However, you can go to reports and run a report on a given student and the dropped items will appear in gray.

You may also wonder if a category is set to drop the lowest grade and there is an “extra credit” item in the category, will the extra credit item get dropped if it is lowest scored item? Or what if the extra credit item is not completed by the student? You would not expect extra credit items to be dropped and that is how ANGEL behaves. The extra credit item is not dropped.

Use of Secure Browser in ANGEL

Some faculty when setting up assessments have selected the High - requires Secure ANGEL browser option when they establish Browser Security (You select the Settings link under the assessment name and then go to the Access tab). The Secure Browser setting means (for all practical purposes) the student must take the test in the JCCC Testing Center (that’s the only location on our campus where we’ve installed the Secure Browser). A better option is selecting None or Medium for Browser Security.

Cure for Slow Manage Tab

At JCCC, we were experiencing a significant slowdown when faculty used the ANGEL Manage tab (to access Roster, Grade Book and so on). We're running ANGEL 7.3. ANGEL has supplied a fix (December 2009) that we have not yet tested, but attributed the slowdown to the Course Theme Selector nugget on the Manage tab (which is available for each course). There is another link for the Course Theme Selector on the Manage tab in the Course Settings nugget that does the same thing. To avoid the slowdown we’ve removed the Course Theme Selector nugget on the Manage tab and to change the course theme, faculty would need to use the link under the Course Settings nugget.

Giving Students Early Course Access

At JCCC faculty can grant students access to one of your courses (using ANGEL) earlier than the first day of class (for Spring taht date is January 20, 2010), here are the steps to change the availability date. The same steps apply if you want to extend student access to a course beyond the default closing date, which at Johnson County Community College (JCCC) is two weeks after the end of finals (i.e., June 4, 2010):

1. Log into ANGEL and access the specific course.
2. Select the Manage tab.
3. In the Course Settings nugget, select the General Course Settings link.
4. Scroll down and make the required changes to the Course Begins date and time settings and Course Ends date and time settings.
5. Be sure the check boxes in front of the two settings are selected.
6. Click the Save button at the bottom of the screen.

It’s important to note that by default, the Course Begins date at JCCC is always set to the first day of the class and the Course Ends date is always set by default to two weeks after the class ends.

Not Moving to ANGEL 7.4

Just prior to the Thanksgiving Break, the Educational Technology Center staff at JCCC completed the first round of tests of ANGEL 7.4 (originally scheduled to be installed over the upcoming semester break and ready for production/faculty use in January 2010). Based on that testing, we recommended to JCCC's ANGEL Implementation Team (and notified our Distance Learning Advisory Council) that sufficient time was not available prior to the planned upgrade to complete testing, explore new features and resolve a number of issues encountered (e.g., the new Gradebook functionality, exception errors encountered and more). As a result, the Implementation Team has decided to postpone the ANGEL 7.4 upgrade until at least summer 2010.

We’ll be testing additional 7.3 patches available for ANGEL in a pre-production environment and will install the new 7.3 patches at an appropriate time this spring.

Our Testing Results
For the record, during our initial testing we encountered multiple problems and felt we could not work through these issues in time for a January update. All of the following were reported to Blackboard/ANGEL and in some cases they responded with potential fixes, that we do not have time to implement or test. Here’s a quick cut and paste of the issues we did encounter.

1. We tried to create a new course similar to a source course in ANGEL and for some system editors, did not allow the user to add the course title, received an error message.
2. We tried to view the course preview and setting for the 7.4 courses. longer have the edit pencil in 7.4 or could not preview the course without an error.
3. When a course includes a quiz (even though we never used Quizes, just assessments, many epacks come with quizzes to amke them compatible with 7.2) when the course opens there is a pop up that asks if you want to convert all of your quizzes to assessments. If you click "no" it keeps popping up. If you click "yes" you get an error page. It did not actually convert anything and the pop up continues to appear no matter what one does. Note: This pop up only occurs if you have an old format quiz in the course.
4. You cannot create a Grading Scale in the Gradebook. Go to Gradebook click on Grading Scale try to enter a grade letter and a number and click on new Item. Nothing happens and it is not added.
5. When attempting to enter certain courses (clicking the course name in the course list) an error message appears in a new tab. It is possible to enter the course and the course seems to run fine except for the error message re-appearing when you click on the "Course" tab.
6. The Grade Entry Grid does not load. There is a message that says "There is no grading scale defined for this course. You may see incomplete grade data until a complete grading scale is created."
7. When you go to Manage Tab>Grade Reports and click Rearrange, you get a server application error (but you can go to the Reports Tab and see My Gradebook)
8. When using the “Ungraded Items” in the Tasks List, on the Course Guide, a tester reported that when she clicked on the Mid-Term (an assessment in ANGEL with just 4 questions), you get some of those questions repeated in the ungraded list.
9. You get an error when you try to Publish Grades: “There are no allowable grade values defined by the administrator. . .” There are grades present, though because the Submission Manager appears to work correctly, showing you the grades and comments that have already been entered. You can also grade assignments by going to the assignment and clicking on Submissions
10. Add Item button does nothing. Browser reports a JavaScript error: "Angel is not defined","https://owa.jccc.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=d3bce8fd830f4801ba4cfed8094794bc&URL=https%3a%2f%2fangeltest.jccc.edu%2fsection%2fGB%2fCategories%2fDefault-min-Loc-en-US.js","Line: 19". That line reads: "{Angel.API.Ajax.Gradebook.SaveCategories(json,strPropertyList,objGrid.SaveDataSuccess,objGrid.SaveDataFailure,objGrid);}"
11. On the 7.4 pre-prod server, when copying a course over another course, not a blank shell, the copy process took exceedingly long (30 Minutes). Also the new homepage fro the target course, did not match the original course home page format/arrangement, that is, some elements were present but not in the original locations, and the theme was not copied over.

Just for what it’s worth.

ANGEL Tip – What’s a Chat Room Anyway?

One of the tools available in ANGEL is the Live Chat nugget. As the name implies, this tool is for synchronous conversations, or chats. To take advantage of this tool, you would first make sure the Live Chat nugget is available in your course – usually this is present on the Communicate tab. If not, you can use the Edit Page link and then the Add Components button to add the Live Chat nugget to the page.

Next you need to add an actual chat room. You can add as many different rooms as you like. Think of them like actual rooms, with labels on the doors. If you want to chat about a certain subject or on a certain date, you would enter the room with that label. As the instructor, you determine what label you want on the “door” by naming your chat room. Or, you can have a generic chat room for general purpose use, in which case you might just call it something like Chat Room. To create a room (and give it a name), just click on the pencil icon at the top of the Live Chat nugget and then choose Add a Live Chat . Fill out the options and click Save . If you want to change any of the options you selected, you can click on the pencil icon and then click on the Edit button next to the chat room you want to edit.

Whatever you name your room and however many rooms you have in your course, there are some things you should know about chat rooms. When you enter a chat room, it’s like walking into a real room. Whatever was said before you entered is not available to you. All you “hear” (i.e., see on the screen) is what is happening when you are in the room. If you leave the room and come back in, you will no longer see the text that was on the screen when you left – it’s like starting over!

You can save a record of everything said in a chat room. To do this, you must turn Tracking to ON in the chat room settings.

You can then review all posted messages in saved chat logs. Be sure that you make it clear to your students which rooms are being recorded and which are not!

ANGEL TIP: TEAMS & UNREAD DISCUSSIONS POSTINGS

Faculty members have reported that unread discussions are not showing up in the Tasks area of the course Guide. Here’s what we discovered: If you create new teams with ANGEL randomly generating only students, you will not be on any of the new teams. If you are the Course Editor, but not on a team, you can read the discussions, but new unread postings will not appear in the Tasks area as unread discussions. Once you assign yourself to the new team(s), the unread postings will appear in the Tasks area.

ANGEL TIP: USING THE COURSE ANNOUNCEMENTS TOOL EFFECTIVELY

The Course Announcements nugget is a common place many instructors use to communicate important information to their students. Do realize, however, that whatever you put in this nugget is also visible on the Personal Home Page (the page you see after logging in to ANGEL but before you select a class) in the My Announcements nugget.

This functionality can be helpful if you have information you want students to see even before they log into your class. However, you should be aware that if you include some kind of formatted content, like a large image or a table, your announcement could affect the appearance of the Personal Home Page for all of your students. If you include something (like an image or a table) that cannot collapse to a smaller width, it will cause the whole column that includes the My Announcements nugget to remain at that width. This causes the other columns to shrink to smaller widths, which can make it difficult for students to locate their courses or read other content.

If you want to make an announcement in your course that does not appear on the Personal Home Page, you can consider using the Course News nugget rather than the Course Announcements nugget.

Thanks to Tracy Newman for sharing this tip.

Reordering Discussions in the Discussion Forums Nugget

You can now change the way Discussions are listed in the Discussion Forums nugget that appears by default on the Communicate tab (and can be added to the Resources page or the Course Home page).

1. Go to the Communicate tab (or wherever your Discussion Forums nugget is located).
2. Mouse over the Discussion Forums nugget and click on the pencil icon.







3. Choose the order you would like to use to display your discussion forums within the Discussion Forums nugget.
   


4. Check the boxes for the other options you want.




5. Click the Save button.