Sharing Office Files in Confluence
The reason we host the Confluence wiki at Cornell is so that people can easily get their work online for sharing and collaborating. Based on its popularity, it seems to be doing its job well.
But part of what makes Confluence work so well is that it doesn’t provide a lot of options for formatting. We get calls and emails from people who are collaborating on a project where the end product is an Office document, and Confluence just doesn’t provide all the Office features that they need.
We understand why this is a problem, and so we’ve installed the Office Connector plugin for Confluence. This plugin allows you to embed your Office document for display in a Confluence page, and – if you have edit permissions for the page – click on the document name, open and edit the document in the corresponding Office program, and save the page back to Confluence.
We’re using the Office Connector here in FSS for collaborating on Excel spreadsheets, because sometimes the tables in Confluence just don’t behave as expected. We’ve also seen classes that are using the Office Connector to build PowerPoint presentations in a collaborative way. And we’re looking at a corresponding Visio plugin so that people can have their Visio diagrams embedded in a Confluence page.
There are still a few issues with the Connector – for example, it’s a bit more clunky if you use a Mac – but it solves a lot of problems. We’ve put together some documentation for it at https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/CONFDOCS/Viewfile+Macro. We’re interested in finding out if anyone is using it in instruction – let us know!
Green Course Technologies
The 4000+ faculty members and instructors who use Blackboard here at Cornell have many reasons for using a course management system – it’s used for sharing materials, conducting asynchronous discussions, giving quizzes, and collecting assignments. But did you know that it’s an easy way to help Cornell be more green?
The average instructor-to-student ratio for Blackboard courses is 10 to 1. So, each reading that’s posted to Blackboard means 10 copies of the reading that don’t need to be printed… and 10 fewer copies that end up buried in a notebook somewhere, or in a landfill after the student graduates.
Likewise, Blackboard allows the student to submit assignments electronically, either via the Assignments feature or by using the Digital Dropbox. For assignments that can’t be submitted online, the CIT Academic Labs printers are stocked with 100% recycled paper. (Information on how to post an assignment in Blackboard – and how to read student submissions – can be found in our documentation wiki.)
The other course technologies that we support – wikis, blogs, surveys, discussion boards – are also good green options when compared to their paper counterparts.
If you’re interested in learning more about Blackboard or our other technologies, let us know! You can email atc_support@cornell.edu… and make Cornell a greener place.
Welcome
Welcome to the blog for the Faculty Support Services for Teaching with Technology to stay informed about services, technologies for teaching, news & updates, and events.
Visit CIT’s Quarterly Faculty Newsletter to learn about “A new Academic Technology Center (ATC) opened in Stimson Hall…”
Faculty Support Services can help you integrate instructional technology tools and practices into your courses.
Our services include: course & research web sites, Blackboard, audio-video-podcasting for instruction, online surveys and quizzes, course communication-collaboration tools, i-Clicker classroom response “polling” systems.
We also provide training and individual consultations about the technology options available for your courses.
Visit the FSS program site at: http://atc.cit.cornell.edu/