“MoCo” Meeting summary

Blackboard have several interest groups in their Community Site. One that I attend when is “MoCo“, which covers both the mobile app and collaborate.

The September meeting , covered several useful points. Feel free to watch it (it’s an hour long), but if you’d like a summary…

  • Polls and Reporting – if you’d like to download the poll, to see the results (and who voted what, so they’re not quite anonymous), you have to remember to stop the poll.
  • Guest link – The guest link remains static for the session. Some people had reported creating a guest link, leaving the settings as the default of “Participant”; then updating the permissions to be a moderator, and (as they thought) getting a different URL. However, it was merely updating the permissions of anyone arriving as a guest. The general advice is that all guests should arrive as a participant – and you can then upgrade them if needed (e.g. an external speaker, yourself with a second login to use two devices)
  • Welcome slides – saved as multi-slide gif. Several people shared their versions of these. If you are using a multi-slide gif for a placeholder (which you can generate from the latest version of PowerPoint), remember to include visible slide numbers, so students know how many to keep an eye out for.
  • Accessing Collaborate on a Mobile device If you have the mobile app, for a collaborate session it should re-direct you to a browser (Chrome on Android / Safari on Mac) – this will give users almost all functionality of a computer 
  • Introduction to Collaborate: Matt Deeprose (Southampton) slide set for a 1-hour intro to collaborate for students. It’s designed for a variety of uses, so sections can be included or not, as you see fit. 
  • Chrome and automatic captions – this is more for the students than for you – as students must enable it. However, you may want to investigate it, and point students for it. 
  • Release Notes for October:  – These are always provisional – but it’s useful to have an idea of what’s coming up. 
  • Blackboard newsletter – you can sign up to these – here’s the most recent if you’re interested. It includes some upcoming Blackboard sessions. 

The next meeting, on the last Friday in October, will focus on the Mobile app- as Dan Lowry, the head of Mobile apps/experience will be joining the session. 

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