Was just exchanging email with Shelly in Texas and noticed she had recently blogged about a novel implementation of the Chatango tool I mentioned way back in August. What she’s done is instead of having that application appear on her library service page, she’s integrated it into WebCT, so it appears right in front of the students where they are (in their course shell), instead of where we wish they would be (on our library pages) :-). This makes a whole lot of sense to me. I’ve been meaning to let you all know that IMHO my experiment with Chatango has been a dismal failure because only one student has contacted me through it, but now I think it’s probably a result of its location. Added to my to do list: implement Chatango into a couple BlackBoard courses and see if the usage picks up. Thanks Shelly!
Link: RSS ROCKS! — The Learning Web – Central.
(stick with Shelly’s blog – they’re just implementing a new content management system down there and haven’t got the RSS feeds working for the blog component yet).
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4 Responses to “RSS ROCKS! — The Learning Web – Central”
At Baruch College a few years ago, we added an Ask a Librarian link to the main page of Blackboard that every student (and faculty member) sees when they log in to the system. We’ve gotten a fair number of chats this way, but not an overwhelming number. Still, it is part of my mission to get a link to the service in as many places as I can (it’s also a desktop shortcut on every PC in the library and in computer labs around campus).
We have DE library services button on our students’ “MyWebCT” pages. In our experience, even with a bright orange button to get attention, things place in this shell get only moderate attention. 🙁 Perhaps though a chat window of sorts might be more effective… ? I think moving things straight into the WebCT classroom itself will be our best bet.
The Catango thing is hard to read. And it is not self-explanatory. It is a good tool, and the idea of inserting it into LMS web pages seems like a good one to me. Good luck with it. Let us know how it turns out.
Steve, I went back and looked at the preferences for Chatango and see that in fact you can control the whole interface, from size to color to font size. So you don’t have to take their default “small box” size – does that help the readability for you?
(http://www.chatango.com/signupmini)