Honored to Accept 2012 Blackboard Catalyst Award on Behalf of My NIU Colleagues at BbWorld 2012

One of the many highlights for me from BbWorld 2012 was to accept on behalf of all the colleagues I work with at NIU, the 2012 Blackboard Catalyst Award for Community Collaboration. This award recognizes leaders within the Blackboard user community who encourage collaboration, and share advice, insight, content, and effective practices with fellow educators outside their own institutions.

Accepting the award from Ray Henderson
Accepting the 2012 Blackboard Catalyst Award from Ray Henderson, President and Chief Technology Office, Blackboard

Our center was recognized for its long history of collaborating with others in the support of teaching with technology, sharing advice, insight, and best practices. This was the second year in a row our Center was recognized with a Blackboard Catalyst Award, with last year’s award being for excellence in professional development.

I am indeed blessed to work with an amazing team of colleagues at NIU and look forward to the future as we together we continue to make every effort at being “catalysts” in support of the the teaching mission of NIU.

LMS Upgrade: Roadmap for Successful Implementation

The upgrade to Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1 at Northern Illinois University from Release 8.0 has proven to be very successful and has been receiving a lot of positive feedback from faculty and teaching staff. This session I led at Blackboard World 2012 on Thu, 7/12/12, 8:45AM-9:15AM, Digital Content and Upgrade Center shared the strategies and practices that made the upgrade a success and can be applied to any upcoming LMS upgrade.

Join in the conversation on Twitter using session hashtag #niulms and find online interactive handout, including links to download plan source files, at j.mp/niuplan

This session was recorded and the link to view the archive will be added here as soon as it becomes available.

Northern Illinois University: Success with Blackboard Collaborate, Blackboard Learn, Blackboard Mobile, and More

During this presentation at BbWorld 2012, my colleague from NIU, Vance Moore, and I were joined by Rajeev Arora, V.P. for Marketing & Strategy at Blackboard Collaborate, and discussed how NIU has harnessed the power of multiple Blackboard platforms to create a smooth-yet-powerful online learning environment.

We mentioned the following online resources (and included links in the provided slides) during the presentation:

Blackboard Tutorials, Helps, and Resources @BlackboardTutor Moving to the Next Level

Back in March 2009, I had the idea of beginning to aggregate and share the best tutorials, helps, and resources I found online, including resources from the NIU Teaching with Blackboard site that my colleagues and I develop and maintain. I went ahead and setup a free Twitter account @BlackboardTutor and using TwitterFeed, created several different automated actions whereby when I bookmarked a resource, it would automatically be tweeted.

first Tweet from @BlackboardTutor

After doing the initial setup, it was years before I would again log back into this Twitter account, as new tweets were automatically posted when Blackboard helps were bookmarked or shared online.

Since that time, what began initially as just a social media experiment has blossomed into a trusted resource, with currently nearly 1,900 followers to date. Desiring for this resource to continue to grow and benefit others in the Blackboard community, I approached Blackboard to see if it is a social media resource they would be willing to take over, and they gladly accepted. So, I’m pleased to report that moving forward, @BlackboardTutor will be moving to the next level as it will be more actively managed by Blackboard’s social media team. It is my hope that it will continue to be a great aggregator of newly available Blackboard support resources, tutorials, etc. that will benefit the entire Blackboard user community worldwide. Follow @BlackboardTutor and watch for many more support resources to come!