#FF Back To School Edition

For those that are starting out or returning to the Ted Rogers School of Management to study Business Technology Management (formerly known as Information Technology Management) at Ryerson University, make sure you follow these important people:

1. Women in ITM (WITM): This organization is dedicated to supporting women within the BTM program. They welcome both men and women to many of their events, but focus much on encouraging young women to not only enter the technology field but to remain in it, especially past first year. Some of their past events include Networking Bootcamps, Computer Hardware Workshops and panels on Breaking The Glass Ceiling

2. ITM Students’ Association (ITMSA): This group is dedicated to the BTM students at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. Like WITM, they have some great programs such as their networking night and the Apprentice program which looks great on a resume. Make sure you check out what they have planned this semester.

3. ITM: This is the official Twitter account for the School of ITM at Ryerson University. They are just getting started, so bear with them as they find their way around.

4. Ted Rogers School of Management (TRSM): The twitter account for the Ted Rogers School of Management which houses not only the BTM program, but the Business Management, Retail Management and Hospitality and Tourism. They give information not only about the individual schools, but about goings on in the building itself, as well as the other organizations in the school such as RUBAA

5. RyersonU: The official twitter account for Ryerson University. Check here for information about the university, interviews, and events around the entire university. This is a must for every RU student and faculty.

Have a great school year!

Ryerson University

 

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Blackboard version 9 – Grade Center

For those that have used Blackboard in earlier iterations, this would have been called the Grade Book. Now, in version 9, it is called Grade Center.

There are some serious improvements to this version. Up until this past summer, Ryerson was running on version 7.3. One of the big improvements is that you can edit grades right in the grade center by clicking into the cell that you want to change. It operates much more like Excel now, but depending on your connection, it can be slow to enter grades directly into this interface. It’s good for a mark or two, but I wouldn’t recommend entering an entire classful of grades through this interface. You’re better off downloading the grade center and then doing it in Excel.

Downloading the Grade Center is just as easy as before, and then some. One of the new features is something called Smart Views. This allows you to customize what you see in the Grade Center and can be based upon a query. Now here’s the great part: you can download the Smart View! So if I don’t want to download all of the test scores, and assignments, and…and…and, I can simply select the Smart View and download by Smart View. This gives me the records and columns that I want, nothing more. Obviously, I don’t recommend downloading this without things like Student name or number.

Let me give you a great case for this: You have a number of TA’s that are assisting with marking. At Ryerson, we divide our classes by section number. You could be taking ITM102 at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson along with 1500 other students. So how do you know which day you attend lectures and which day you attend your even smaller tutorials? By section number. Let’s say that one lecture has 500 students in it, but they all have different tutorials. The lecture section number could be 011 and the tutorial would be 012.  In the lecture you could have 12 different sections and 4 TA’s. You can set up a Smart View to have just the sections that a particular TA is responsible for (sections 011, 021, 031 and 041) which will list just those records and then have an assignment for which they are entering grades (10 mark assignment). Set up the Smart View by the TA’s name, and then they don’t enter anything they aren’t supposed to. Even better, you simply download that spreadsheet and send it to them. Have them fill in the blanks (with no formulas!) and then upload it back into the Grade Center.  If you download the column from the Grade Center and the TA fills in the blanks, the header of the column has a unique identifier that Blackboard will recognize when you upload it. During the upload, Blackboard will ask you which column to upload. Keep in mind, to upload back into the Grade Center, you need to save the .xls or .xlsx file as a .csv!

There’s your first lesson. How did you do? How did I do? Let me know and what you would like to know about Blackboard.

Introduction to Blackboard (Version 9)

One thing that I found lacking when using Blackboard is the documentation that goes along with it. I learned everything I know about it from the Digital Media Team at my University when I became a Graduate Assistant. There are definitely some glitches with the system, but overall it’s pretty good. I’ll discuss some of the procedures as well as some of the shortcomings that I’ve discovered. So I think I’ll start with that…look out gang, ’cause here comes Blackboard 9!

Students Caught Cheating

For those students at Ryerson (or anywhere else for that matter) that follow my blog, I wanted to share with you some of the reasons why we specifically do not release the answers from our weekly tests in ITM102. The test bank belongs to our publisher and this is the exact thing they, as well as Ryerson and other Universities using test banks, want to avoid. It may not seem fair that you can’t see your answers, but this is what can happen.

Professor’s Lecture on cheating at Central Florida University