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What's New?
- Summer, 2007 - The What's New? module was enabled. The What's New? module displays the number of new items posted to each of your Chalk course sites. The module displays Assessments, Assignments and Content which are available to the entire course for the past 7 days. Adaptive Release Content that becomes available to an individual is not reported in the What's New? module. The What's New? module will report changes just once a day unless the user clicks Refresh. (tutoral coming soon)
- Spring, 2007 - The Discussion Grader Building Block* was installed. The Discussion Grader simplifies the process of evaluating a student's participation in a discussion board forum by allowing an instructor to access to a single page with every message that a student has posted to a particular forum, number of words per message, and number of original messages and replies. After evaluating this information, the instructors can then easily enter a grade for the student which will be stored in the Chalk gradebook for the course. (tutorial coming soon)
- Winter, 2007 - The Horizon Wimba Voice Tools Building Block* was installed. This allows instructors to record Voice Announcements, Voice Discussion Boards, general Voice Recordings and send Voice emails through Chalk. See Voice Tutorial.
- Fall, 2006 - The Learning Objects Blog and Wiki Building Block* was installed. This allows instructors to have Blogs and Wiki's in their course with three options: course-wide, per individual student or open to only a certain Group of students (great for group projects). See Blog Tutorial and/or Wiki Tutorial.
- Winter, 2006 - The Library's e-Reserve System and Chalk were integrated even further. Now if an instructor has e-Reserve material, it is automatically placed in the instructor's Chalk course site.
- Fall, 2005 - The Document Unpackager Building Block* was installed. Prior to this Building Block, documents could only be uploaded into Chalk one item at a time. The Document Unpackager allows you to upload a zip file containing folders and files to Chalk. It is then unpackaged and course content items are created with the files attached. The directory structure within the zip file is translated into folders within Chalk. All content created by the Building Block is usable even if the Building Block is removed at a later time. See tutorial .
- Fall, 2005 - Power User Enrollment Building Block* was installed. This course tool appears in the instructor's control panel and provides and alternative to Chalk's built-in user enrollment and role assignment. It provides the following features: (1) enroll users and assign roles (e.g. instructor, TA) in a single step; (2) search for multiple users to add by a comma separated list of keywords searching by last name, username or email; (3) control paging, the number of users to display per page of search results; and (4) select all functions for both the list of displayed users and role assignments. See tutorial.
- Fall, 2005 - The Advanced Group Management Building Block* was installed. This course tool extension appears in the instructor's control panel and provides an alternative to Chalk's built-in group management tools. It includes the same functions as the built-in tools, with the following additional features: (1) summary display of all groups, their membership count, and enable features in one matrix; (2) ability to view/modify membership assignments to all groups in one display page, and thus more easily balance group assignment tasks; (3) random assignment of students to groups, whether overlapping membership or disjoint; and (4) simultaneous multiple deletes of groups.
- Fall, 2005 - The MERLOT Building Block* was installed. This tool will allow instructors to search for educational materials available through the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) without exiting their Chalk course site. MERLOT (www.merlot.org), a free and open resource, features more than 12,000 online educational materials and more than 25,000 members representing the higher education community. Instructors can apply search results to and embed links directly in their Chalk course site. The MERLOT Building block can be accessed by entering your Chalk course site, selecting Control Panel, selecting a content area, and clicking on the Drop Down Box next to +Select Icon located near the right of the screen.
- Summer, 2005 - Between Summer and Fall quarters, a software upgrade was applied - Blackboard Academic SuiteTM (6.3.1.424).
- Building Blocks are an independent enhancement to the Blackboard Academic Suite.
Last updated: 9/17/07