News archive

• eLearning Innovation Expo - SOLD OUT
  Queensland educators are being encouraged to secure their seats early for Smart Classrooms' premier event – the eLearning Innovation Expo. With registrations already filling fast, the 8-9 September 2009 event looks like it will be a sell-out within days. Director of the eLearning Branch, Laurie Campbell says the eLearning Innovation Expo will be the best opportunity for Queensland teachers, Principals and regional staff to learn about the latest in ICT.
  
  'We have author, IT company director and worldwide education institution consultant, Mark Treadwell on board, as well as one of the true pioneers in the 1:1 laptop movement, Gary Stager.'
  
  Following the success of last year's guest appearance, the founder of Europe's ICT and learning research centre, Stephen Heppell will also be back.
  
  'Conference delegates will have the opportunity network directly with representatives from industry and discuss the best opportunities for teaching and learning with ICT.'
  
  The two-day Expo, held following the prestigious Smart Classrooms Teacher Awards 2009, will consist of high level workshops and industry displays.
  
  Keynote speeches and workshops will include:

  • Smart Classrooms: Learning Productivity
  • 'U'Learning: The impact of ubiquitous, mobile access on teaching and learning in Queensland schools
  • Students' perspective of learning in a virtual world
  • First steps in mobile phone development
  • Poster sessions from Teacher Award winners
  
  This year, delegates will also have the added flexibility of attending just one or both days of the eLearning Innovation Expo. The first 150 people to register for both days of the Expo are also eligible to free entry to the Smart Classrooms Teacher Awards on 7 September 2009.
  
  'Senior eLearning staff will also be running presentations and workshops throughout the day to keep teachers informed about the learning applications of new and emerging technologies,' says Mr Campbell.
  
  TICKETS SOLD OUT - visit the Smart Classrooms website for more information.

• QLD Academy for Creative Industries supports Year of Creativity Challenge
  Join in the challenge to design The Learning Space of the Future hosted by the Queensland Academy for Creative Industries as part of the Year of Creativity celebrations. Prepare a design pitch for submission to the Academy website on July 16 for judging by a panel of design experts.
  
  Participate in the Academy Creative Challenge project room.

  • Blog your progress and podcast your thoughts.
  • Registered schools may chat with Italian Architect, Professor Carlo Ratti, Queensland's Innovator in Residence.
  
  To register visit Creative challenges - Challenge 2 - The Next Big Idea: Designing the Learning Community of the Future
  
  Challenge Project Room enquiries: Jennie Jahnke

• New pack prepares teachers for licence accreditation A new resource is available to help teachers get one step closer to Digital Pedagogy Licence accreditation.
  
  Called the Digital Pedagogy Pack, the resource helps teachers develop the reflective statement component of the digital portfolios they need to seek accreditation. Importantly, the pack also helps teachers get the most from ICT to support, enhance, enable and transform teaching and learning, including planning, assessing and reporting.

• Smart Classrooms updates PD Framework
  A refreshed Smart Classrooms Professional Development Framework has been launched.
  The update keeps the framework abreast of changes in teacher and school needs, and worldwide advances in digital pedagogy.
  
  Visit the new one-stop-shop PD framework website for an overview of the changes.
  
  Already working towards accreditation? If you started working towards the ICT Certificate before the updated framework was launched, you have a choice of using the updated indicators and accreditation process or the former indicators and process.
  
  If you’ve already started working towards the ICT Pedagogical Licence, you may continue to use the former indicators.

• Interim problem: Bulk uploading of student registrations into LPAS
  LPAS is experiencing slowness due to large volumes of bulk uploads.
  
  Interim solution: Please forward your bulk uploads and enrolment requests to the Learning Place inbox.
  1. Save the spreadsheet template as a .csv file on your computer.
  2. Complete the spreadsheet with the users details; mandatory fields include family and given name and Learning Place user id.
  3. Email the spreadsheet to the Learning Place inbox learningplace@deta.qld.gov.au.

  Learning Place staff will process these for you in a timely manner and contact you when finalised. Please note that you may still undertake bulk uploads yourself. However, uploads during peak periods could result in slow responses or time out errors. The Learning Place has the following suggestions to help ensure success:

  1. Wherever possible, upload your file in a period where activity on the network is limited.
  2. When uploading files try to cap numbers to 100 per file.
  3. Try and process one file at a time.

  The Learning Place apologises for any inconvenience and is working to rectify this problem.

• Atomic Learning tutorials
  The Atomic Learning library contains more than 110 applications and thousands of short tutorials. The collection now includes video tutorials on Assistive Technology with the focus on hardware and software assistive devices. You need to have access to Blackboard either through a course or community to view the tutorials. Read more...

• Budding bards win online chat with top author and poet
  The two winners of this year’s Online Poetry Competition have received online workshops for their classes with award-winning Australian author and poet Libby Hathorn.
  
  Run by Smart Classrooms Mentor Tania Angus and hosted by the Learning Place, the Online Poetry Competition invited primary and secondary students from around Queensland to write and submit a haiku poem. This year 1113 primary and 34 secondary haiku poems were submitted by schools across the state.
  
  Trinity Beach State School Year 7 student Samuel won the primary school category while Narangba Valley State High School Year 9 student Michael took out the award in the secondary school category.
  
  During the hour-long workshop with Libby, the competition winners and their classmates will have the chance to ask a range of questions on the art of writing poetry and fictional books.
  
  Libby is the author of many works for children and young adults and has won awards and honours for excellence in works of fiction both in Australia and internationally. Read the winning entries and highly commended poems at the Online Poetry Competition home page.

• Professional Communities site is now faster
  Users of the Professional Communities will have noticed a significant increase in the speed of site. A number of factors have combined to result in the reduction of response times including moving to a new server. Learning Place staff endeavours to provide the best possible service to clients. We trust that the speed of the site allows community managers to use their community space even more effectively.

• Respondus and StudyMate Patch
  We are pleased to announce that for existing and new Respondus and StudyMate users a patch has now been released which will allow you to publish assessments or activities directly to Blackboard from Respondus and StudyMate. This patch will work on MOE and non-MOE machines.
  Download the Respondus or StudyMate patch:

  1. Logon to Blackboard and go to the Teaching in Blackboard community.(Not a member? Join the Teaching in Blackboard community for support in Blackboard.)
  2. Select 'Respondus and Studymate' from the left-hand menu.
  3. View the section 'Respondus and StudyMate Patch' for further instructions.

• Publishing assessments to Blackboard (from MOE computers)
  A new authentication step will appear during the Publish Wizard process when Respondus attempts to connect to Blackboard. Here you will need to supply your network username and password (your MIS network account that you login with each day).

• New features in Blackboard 7.2
  Blackboard 7.2 has improved functionality to support your teaching and students learning including:
  • The ability to associate gradebook grades with discussion forums.
  • Improved statistics for each student showing participation.
  • Peer reviews of forum posts via 5-star rating system.
  • Simplified sharing capabilities of tests and surveys between courses.
  • New Early Warning System to monitor and report on student performance.
  • New visual text box editor (or WYSIWYG) working with Macs.
  • Support for multi-byte characters. (eg. Chinese and Japanese).
    
    
  Announcements - Generate a class-wide email when creating or modifying a course announcement.
  
  Email:
  • Send email to 'All student users' (will not send to other instructors).
  • Announcement emails are sent with formatting included (sent as HTML).
  • Course Email tool can include HTML (only for advanced users – HTML knowledge required).
  • Subject lines from emails (sent from within Blackboard) are prefixed with the Course ID.
    
    
Assessments/Gradebook:
• Instructors can add comments to each student's grades. These comments can be seen by the student through the View Grades tool.
• Due dates can be applied to items.
• Tests and Surveys can now be directly exported and imported (ie. without Respondus or using Pools).
• Multiple attempts can be restricted to a specified number of attempts.
• Greater flexibility in showing test feedback. eg. individual question feedback can be displayed without showing the correct answers for those answered incorrectly.
• Tests can be set as 'Self-assessment' (ie. not included in Gradebook).
• Test questions can be defined as 'extra credit' questions, which means the points possible for a test will not include the points for the extra credit question.
• New Early Warning System allows instructors to create rules which monitor and report on student performance.
  
  
Discussion Boards:
• TOTALLY DIFFERENT!
• Able to associate gradebook grades with discussion forums and threads.
• Statistics for each student, showing: total posts, date of last post, average post length, min & max post lengths, average post position.
• Can now moderate forums (ie. instructor/moderator controls what is publicly published).
• Forums can be managed by students (via instructor set-up).
• Peer review of posts via 5-star rating system.
• Subscribe to threads – receive emails when new replies are posted.
• Forums are now able to be copied.
• Posts can be saved as Draft (ie. only seen by participant until submitted publicly).
• Forums can now be made available or unavailable.
• Greater searching capabilities within/across discussion boards.
  
  
Editing content:
• New visual text box editor (or WYSIWYG) works across greater number of browser OS combinations.
• Support for multibyte characters. (eg. Chinese and Japanese).

Working offline - support for Blackboard Backpack product (user pays).

• Interim Learning Place website
  An interim Learning Place website is in development. The idea behind the interim site is to emulate the ‘look and feel’ of the future OnePortal site so that when the OnePortal system is fully implemented, the interface is somewhat familiar to Learning Place users.

• OnePortal Learning Place website
  The Learning Place website is being redeveloped on a MOSS (Microsoft office SharePoint Services) platform. Your wonderful feedback and use of the Learning Place has resulted in the following planned changes:
  • We have a new design to reflect the connected nature of learning.
  • A personalized interface so that your courses, events, communities and resources will be easily accessed through My Learning Space.
  • Improved navigation – more intuitive, related to how you use the site to suit your needs. 
  • Improved search including a Federated search function to search all Learning Place, EQ and external quality resources (including Libraries and Museums etc).
  • Special functions such as RSS feeds to educational resources and information relevant to your learning are at your fingertips.
  • A web conferencing service that allows video and audio conferencing, capture, storage and access by streaming and overnight caching.

• Online Cartooning Competition 2008
  Students are invited to unleash their creative skills by creating a collection of cartoon avatars (cartoon persona) for the Learning Place. The competition consists of 4 separate challenges. Students can enter any or all of the challenges open to their age group. Due date for entries: Friday 23 May 2008. Logon to the project room for more information.

• What's new for users in the CX resource centre with Equella 3.1
  The Curriculum Exchange (CX) resource centre has undergone a major upgrade to its underlying repository system (Equella 3.1). As a result, you will find some changes to the way the CX resource centre supports discovery and use of digital resources.
  Browse through the list of upgrades. 81k

• QMOOnity out to pasture
  We have decided to decommission the MOO. Thanks to Roy Kennedy and Peter Whitehouse for building the MOO and supporting us over the years.

• Podcasting
  Our project rooms now have podcasting activities. Each project room can now be personalized with your own banner and menu.

• New look for our PC homepage
  Our Professional Communities (PCs) have a new home page and an Event registration calendar. The calendar collates all events from each professional learning community. The PC’s also have the ability to upload their own banner.

• Broadband boost to enhance Learning Place access for schools
  More than 7000 staff and students will benefit from a successful bid by our Department for funding from the Australian Government under the Clever Networks program. The program will provide $4.9 million in funding for telecommunications infrastructure upgrades to deliver business grade broadband services to 128 schools between now and December 2009.
  
  The broadband services will greatly enhance educational experiences through the Learning Place. The project represents an exciting development for teaching and learning in schools whose access was previously limited by telecommunications infrastructure.

• Learning Place Affiliates program
  The Learning Place Affiliates program offers Queensland non-state schools and Education faculties at Queensland Universities, the opportunity to develop connected and engaging learning experiences with students. Access the Learning Place (including the Curriculum Exchange resource centre) is from 1st July, 2007. Register your interest today.
• Blackboard and Curriculum Exchange integration
  Blackboard course owners can now embed any digital resource from the Curriculum Exchange quickly into their course. View the video to learn how...
• Blackboard now contains Blogs and Wikis
  Improve the interactivity and collaboration of your courses and online activities by adding a blog or wiki. Specify the student groups that work together to create their project and monitor their work right down to the different authors. Join Teaching in Blackboard to learn more about these tools.

• Integration with the MIS and OnePortal
  The Learning Place will be integrated with the MIS and OnePortal. This will mean that you will not require a separate Learning Place login. Your OnePortal will also feature courses, resources and projects that are important to your learning journey. This project has three stages of development with the first stage being planned for completion by December 2007.