myLesley has a couple of helpful tools that allow you to easily communicate with your students without having to first look up their email addresses or create an email list.
Announcements
Announcements allow you to post timely information and reminders to your students in your myLesley course. You can also send the announcement as an email to all of your students, allowing them to receive the information even if they are not logged into the course. Want to remind them that you are meeting in the lab tomorrow? Learn how in the video below.
Send Email
The Send Email tool allows you to easily send email to a single student in your class, a small group or all students without ever leaving myLesley. You can also email TA’s or another instructor co-teaching with you. Your students can use this tool as well. So much for the excuse that they lost your email address.
Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. Over the next 12 days we will have links to a series of tutorials aimed at increasing your elearning skills.
It can be hard to learn a new skill and research suggesting that it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill to mastery can be offputting. You already have too much to do. However Josh Kaufman suggests that you can become reasonably competent at something in just 20 hours.
What? 20 hours? No way!
Yes, way! It requires a little thought and pre-planning, but you can do it. Watch the video below and Josh will tell you how.
This Fall, Lesley’s Center for Academic Achievement (CAA) launched a pilot of Brainfuse’s Help Now Online Tutoring platform to support online students, off-campus cohorts and other Lesley students whose busy lives prohibit them from accessing tutoring in the CAA. Brainfuse’s Help Now tutoring program includes individualized tutoring and study tools to help Lesley students be successful in their classes. This initiative is one of the Retention Center’s priorities as a result of last years’ exploration of qualitative and quantitative data on student persistence.
HelpNow consists of three components: live tutoring, asynchronous and synchronous writing labs and a learning skills center.
Live tutoring: Live tutoring is provided in a variety of college disciplines including business, math, social sciences and hard sciences. Tutors and students communicate in real time through the Brainfuse online classroom. All sessions are recorded for later review.
Asynchronous Writing Lab: Students submit their writing online through a secure service. Within 24 hours, a writing specialist will return the paper along with a detailed analysis focusing on organization, voice, and coherence. In addition to Brainfuse tutors asynchronous online writing support continues to be available directly from CAA tutors.
Live Writing Lab: Students who are in the preliminary stages of the writing process have the option to receive live, one-to-one writing assistance from a writing specialist.
Learning Skills Center: Students address academic needs such as reading comprehension, developmental math and science or time management to build essential skills for college success. Students are offered a variety of learning options based on the way they learn best.
Brainfuse is integrated into myLesley so all students have easy access to connect with a live tutor. Tutors are experienced classroom teachers with graduate training in their discipline.
Usage so far this semester has been highly successful especially in the Business and Math programs where it was piloted and strongly promoted. Students can easily access Brainfuse Online Tutoring from their myLesley home page. Subjects include Accounting, Statistics, Economics, Calculus, Geometry, Biology, Chemistry, Writing, Psychology and many others.
There’s a new web conferencing tool coming to myLesley this January and it’s called Collaborate Ultra.
Why are we excited? Collaborate Ultra runs in your web browser window. That means that there’s no need to download and install the latest version of java or the Collaborate Launcher before you can join an online meeting. Just click on the webinar link and join your session.
Collaborate Ultra has been completely redesigned with a streamlined interface that’s easy to navigate. Users can easily view content, manage their audio/video, and participate in the chat.
The new interface also includes the gallery or grid view of participants that you have been craving. Now you can see everyone’s face, not just the speaker.
Do you share your computer screen to demonstrate how to do something or give a tour of your course? Collaborate Ultra’s screen sharing feature is faster, smoother, and easier to use than the old Collaborate so your participants will be able to easily follow along.
A few important details Collaborate Ultra works best in the Chrome web browser. Other web browsers, such as Firefox or Safari, will be missing a couple of features:
The gallery view of webinar attendees is only available in Chrome. When using another browser you will only be able to see the webcam of the person speaking.
In order to share your screen you must use Chrome. When using other browsers users will be able to see what is being shared with them, but will not be able to share their own computer desktop.
Your old Collaborate recordings will still be available to you within your myLesley course. Simply go to the old Collaborate tool to access them as always.
Learn more about Collaborate Ultra Get all the info on how to use Collaborate Ultra at our support site and check out the video below to get a tour of the interface.
Do you have questions about using myLesley/Blackboard in your teaching? Do you need help organizing your materials in myLesley? Are you looking to integrate voice or media into your course? Do you want to learn more about a particular tool or process? Have you run into a technical issue?
eLIS is here for you! Beginning Monday, October 31, eLIS will have weekly office hours. No appointment necessary!
