How to add a new student to Sakai *correctly*

One of the most common Sakai problems at the beginning of the term is how give new  students access to Sakai course sites.

At the Claremont Colleges, students are automatically added and dropped from Sakai sites on a daily basis during the add-drop period. Sakai class rosters are updated every night with current data from the Registrars' offices, so new students are added automatically to Sakai course sites within 24 hours of authorized enrollment.

Here are some pointers if you would like to manually add a student to your Sakai course site:

• If you wish to add a student who is not yet officially registered, please assign the student to an Auditor role. The Student and Auditor roles are the same in terms of what the user has access to in your course site.

• Sakai's drop/add scripts ignore Auditors until they are officially students on the class roster. Once a student is officially on the roster, Sakai will automatically change her/his role from Auditor to Student.
  

• If you assign a student to the Student role before s/he is enrolled officially, during the daily Sakai update s/he will be made Inactive automatically. An Inactive Student remains a member of the site but no longer has access to it. To correct this problem if it happens, go to Site Info, changing her/his Role to Auditor and Status to Active, and then click the Update Participants button.
   
• Note: Claremont Colleges students should be added using their Sakai username, generally their network username@abbreviated college (i.e., skullman@scr):
  @scrippscollege.edu becomes @scr ; @pitzer.edu becomes @ptz ; @pomona.edu becomes @pom ; @hmc.edu becomes @hmc ; @cmc.edu becomes @cmc
  CGU is different: studentlastname+1stletter-1stname@cgu
  
• To add non-Claremont College users, including senior auditors, please read the Add (senior) auditors to Sakai course sites post for directions.
  

Add students to a course Sakai site

1. In the course site, click Site Info from the menubar on the left
2. Click Add Participants
3. For students with official usernames, under Claremont Colleges Sakai users [the top box], enter the student(s) username, one address per line (for example, username@scr)
4. Under Participant Roles, choose to give your newly added student(s) the same role, then click Continue
5. Use the buttons to select the Auditor role for the student(s), then click Continue
6. On the next page, select the Send Now button to automatically email the student about the site's availability, then click Continue
7. Confirm that the information for the participant(s) that you are adding is correct, and then click Finish.
   

Interpreting DATA

Fascinating look at "The Beauty of Data Visualization"
David McCandless turns complex data sets like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates and more into beautiful yet simple diagrams. He proposes design as the tool we use to navigate today’s information glut, finding unique patterns and connections that may just change the way we see the world. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2010, July 2010 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 18:17)

“Harness the power of digital images with Photoshop” Workshop

This workshop was a very good reintroduction to Photoshop for me. I used this program in the past and it has changed significantly since then. I will use Photoshop in the Fall for all my WordPress projects.

“Become a facile digital changer with Acrobat” Workshop

This workshop was great because I learned how to use digital signatures. I will definitely use this skill in the Fall for letters of recommendations for my students.

"Your web presence: the good, the bad, & the ugly" Workshop

This workshop was helpful in thinking about how to maintain and most importantly how to update websites easily. I would like to learn more about WordPress in order to make easy to maintain websites for the French Studies Department or for other extracurricular projects I plan for my students. My Fall projects are to envision a website for the department and to design a website for the Music Salon project.

Mobile Computing Workshop

This workshop was very helpful to me because it introduced me to several new mobile devices which my students surely use. In the Fall, I plan to conduct a survey to see if most of my students would prefer to switch to an electronic workbook for their Introductory/Intermediate French courses. I also plan to see how many students have iPads to see if I can help them discover more learning tools.

Harness the power of digital images with Photoshop

This hands-on workshop empowered you to effectively utilize your digital images for pedagogical & professional projects. The workshop explored cropping techniques, creating composites from a set of photos, highlighting your point right on the photo and organizing groups of images.

Online workshop Resources in Sakai here and a refresher video:

How will you implement what you learned in this workshop in a fall 2011 course?

Become a facile digital changer with Acrobat

Acrobat Pro is one of the most underutilized software programs available to Scripps faculty. This hands-on workshop enabled you to:

• transform any document to a universally readable format for emailing or posting on the web (or Sakai)
• protect documents from being excerpted or printed
• add a verifiable and secure digital signature to documents
  Acrobat Pro on Resources in Sakai here + a refresher video

How will you implement what you have learned in this workshop in a fall 2011 course?

Get a grip on Groupwise

Whether you have 10+ years of accumulated email or just this year’s, this hands-on workshop provides an antidote for email disorganization as well as extremely useful guidelines for handling email overload so that you can reclaim time for other tasks.

Online Groupwise resources in Sakai here

How will you implement what you have learned in the workshop in your teaching this fall?

Your web presence: the good, the bad, & the ugly

What is your web presence? Why might it matter? This workshop helps you to answer these questions and examines the options to create or update your Scripps College website (pages.scrippscollege.edu/~yourusername) or department website using

• Dreamweaver web design software
• the Faculty Site Starters program
• iWeb and WordPress software
• perhaps Blogger should have been included.... 

Online workshop Resources in Sakai here

How you will implement what you  learned in this workshop in your teaching this fall?

Mobile Computing ~ who, what where, when &, most importantly, why

Mobile computing swept into our lives @ an amazing pace. This workshop explores the pedagogical, professional and personal potentials & pitfalls of mobile devices (smart phones, iPads, etc.

Online workshop Resources in Sakai here

How you will implement what you  learned in this workshop in a fall 2011 course?

State of the Internet 2010

Video is from Feb 2010. Thought-provoking stats....

JESS3™ / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

JESS3™ designed and animated this for the JESS3™ lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010.

Discussion forums for Sakai course sites

Pedagogy

The Forums tool allows instructors to setup discussion questions that students can access and reply to when they are logged in to Sakai. A forum can be used by the entire class, or Groups within a class. The Forums tool allows for threaded discussions, i.e., student can reply to your (or their) original question or to a response to that question.

The Forums tool can be used in a variety of ways by faculty, including but not limited to:

• Get a better sense of students' understanding of a reading or other course content prior to class based on their responses to a question about it.

• Anticipate / request students to pose questions about an assignment or issue prior to class.

• Encourage collaboration by asking students to share relevant documents or links prior to or following a class meeting.

• Promote written interaction among students outside of the classroom.

• Provide a course "self help" area (Course Q&A) accessible to students 24/7, moderated by the instructor.

With the exception of a Course Q&A discussion area, Forum discussion assignments are only effective when posting is required, generally as part of the class participation grade. Sakai's Forums tool provides statistics about the number of posts authored by students to simplify evaluation. Each post has a built-in word count. Forum postings can be graded and linked to Gradebook items if desired.

Tool tips

For students to use the Forums tool, the instructor must either post an initial Forum post (to which the students will be able to attach Topics and reply to each others' topics), or change student permissions to allow students to post new Forums. Permissions need to be set to allow students to write (author) in the Forums, either universally on a default Forums template or specific to each Forum. To add a Forum post,

• Go to the Forums tool and click New Forum (top).

• Add a Forum Title and, if applicable, Description.

• If you want to attach a document, do so here.
• Here is where you can change the permissions for this specific Forum topic.
  Change the permission level of Site Role: Student to Author to allow students to post new topics, edit their own posts, etc. Click Save.

• To add a new topic, click New Topic under the relevant Forum.

• To reply to a post in a Topic, click on the Topic name and click Post New Thread. Same steps apply here as above.

The Message box associated with Forums (and other Sakai tools) has a "Paste from Word" option that removes Microsoft styles, thus messages can be composed in Word and pasted without Microsoft Word's invisible "coding" effecting text readability.

The Forums tool has a "Watch" option so that you or your students can be notified by email about new forum posts. Since the course Sakai site home page indicates the number of unread Forums posts, "No notification" is recommended to reduce email.

For more information about using the Sakai forums tool at Scripps College, contact Scripps IT-FITS (Faculty Instructional Technology Support)

Online resources

• Contextual help in Sakai - click on the question mark with the blue circle
• Sakai Quick Start Guides (PDFs)
• Sakai @ the Claremont Colleges - SC Faculty Support project site
  Resources > Teaching with Sakai folder
  NEW! Sakai solutions wiki  (click on Wiki link in the project site).Step-by-step solutions to basic Sakai use, working with Sakai Resources, and advanced topics
• Visit I.U.'s OnCourse (Sakai) Forums Help