Making Up For Hurricane Sandy

An Idea Exchange for Baruch Faculty Using Technology to Make Up for Lost Time

Blackboard’s Collaborate Web Conferencing Tool for Live Online Interaction

From Kevin Wolff

Blackboard Collaborate is a web conferencing tool (along the lines of GoToMeeting, Webex or Skype) that uses video and audio for synchronous, i.e., “live,” educational activities over the web. These activities might be online lectures, live online discussions with students, virtual office hours, or student peer-to-peer group work. The students would need to navigate to the appropriate area within Blackboard (from within a Blackboard course site on the left-hand course menu: click Tools > Blackboard Collaborate) and click to join a Blackboard Collaborate session at a designated time.

The sessions allow for live interactive audio communication as well as live video of you and your students (up to six video images at a time). Before joining a web conference (or “webinar”) that will involve audio, it is a good idea for instructors and students to have either (a) a microphone and headphones or (b) a headset (i.e., headphones with built-in microphone). In order to display his or her own video image, each participant would need a computer with either a built-in or an external web camera.

In the web conferencing session, you can use a digital whiteboard, give presentations using PowerPoint (or any other software program), show videos, and navigate to websites as part of your presentation to students. These live sessions can also be recorded so that the students in your class can access them from within the Blackboard course site at their convenience. The tool might even be used for exclusively asynchronous content, e.g., an instructor can set up a Collaborate session in which only he or she is present in order to record a lecture for later access by the students.

* Note: Blackboard’s Collaborate tool is similarly named but very different from Blackboard’s Collaboration tool.

More Resources for Using Blackboard Collaborate
Below are some useful resources for learning more about Collaborate:

General Resources:

* Collaborate Getting Started Quick Reference Guide (PDF)
* Collaborate Overview (Recording) (approx. 11 minutes; requires Java plugin to play)

Specific Collaborate Tools:

* Introduction to the Participants Panel (PDF)
* Using the Audio & Video Panel (PDF)
* Using Chat (PDF)
* Audio Setup Wizard (PDF)
* Loading a PowerPoint File (PDF)
* Using the Whiteboard (PDF)
* Introduction to the Whiteboard (Recording)
* Using the Polling Feature Wizard (PDF)
* Using Application Sharing (PDF)
* Introduction to Application Sharing (Recording)
* Using Web Tour (PDF)
* Introduction to Web Tour (Recording)
* Getting Started with Recordings (PDF)

For more assistance related to Collaborate, the following site has extensive support materials: Blackboard Collaborate Support Site.

You can also contact the Baruch Help Desk at 646-312-1010 or helpdesk@baruch.cuny.edu if you have any questions. We hope Collaborate will prove to be a useful tool to enhance yours and your students’ academic experience at Baruch.

Insert Audio Narration into PowerPoint Slides

From Linda Friedman:

For my STA 2000 class, I inserted narration into my Powerpoint slides. We only missed 2 classes, but I created 4 of these pseudo-classes. While you don’t have the interaction of a “real” class, the advantage here is that each student can play to the instructor’s explanation of difficult material as often as necessary and progress at his/her individual pace. I’m going to continue to use this technique even without the incentive of hurricane days.

To insert narration into slides…

  • Select the slide you’d like to add narration to.
  • Go to Edit –> Audio –> Record Audio… (or Audio from File… if you’re inserting audio that you’ve recorded previously).
  • Make sure the proper input device is selected (Built-in Microphone or any external microphone you have attached to your computer)
  • Click the red Record button to begin recording.
    • You can click the Pause button to pause your recording, then click it again to pick up where you left off.
    • When you’re done recording, click Stop.
    • Clicking Record again after clicking Stop will erase anything you’ve previously recorded to that slide and replace it with the new recording.
    • Click the Save button at the bottom of the window to save your recording.

A speaker icon will show up on the slide to let you know that it has been inserted. You can test the audio by clicking the speaker icon, then using the player that appears underneath it.

ppt audio