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D2L Fusion 2013

This week, I attended Fusion, Desire2Learn's annual User's conference. I've been fortunate to get to attend Fusion for the past 5 years and have always had a blast connecting with other instructional technologists, educators, and D2L staff. This year was no exception. Some of my favorite conference moments were Alec Couros's inspirational keynote presentation, sampling flights of beer from local breweries at the JFK Presidential Museum and Library, learning about some exciting upcoming products, getting recognized by the awesome Barry Dahl for my D2L book, and wrapping up the conference at The Pour House, where I enjoyed my first pickelback with some great friends.

Audrey and I were also fortunate to have the best group of participants we could have hoped for in our session on Replace Strings on Tuesday afternoon. We've posted both the presentation and handout to Github, so feel free to check it out if you're interested.

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A Semester With Glassboard

I’ve never been a big fan of Desire2Learn’s mobile interface. The Discussion tool, particularly, lacks many of the features that would make it useful to mobile users. For that reason, I decided to use an external service for all class discussions and announcements in WEB 2710: Web Design for Mobile Devices this semester. In this post, I’ll give a brief overview of Glassboard, the service I chose, and share my experiences using it for a semester.

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D2L Book Update

(Update - 4/18)

According to the publisher, the corrected version of the book is now available through all channels!

(Update - 2/1)

Great news - it looks like Packt will be releasing an updated version of the book after all! I am not sure when it will be available, but I’ll share details as soon as I find out.

(Update - 1/29)

I finally heard back from Packt Publishing today. Unfortunately, they’ve decided not to release an updated version of the book to address the numerous grammatical errors I discovered after the book’s original publication. I feel this is a huge mistake and a great disservice to potential customers. While I sincerely hope they decide to publish these updates in a future edition, I can’t recommend buying the current version. If anything changes, I’ll add another update to this post.

As some readers of the site are already aware, the current version of Desire2Learn for Higher Education Cookbook contains a number of grammatical errors. Many of these errors were added to the book during the technical editing stage of the book’s production. I’ve contacted the publisher and provided a list of required changes and am currently waiting for a response back from the company. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you don’t purchase the book until these issues are addressed. I’ll post an update to this website when the necessary corrections are made.

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Special Delivery

D2L for Higher Education Cookbook cover

Hot off the press! Copies of my book arrived in the mail today. It’s neat to see months of my work all printed and bound. Plus, it’s very cool to have an ISBN attached to my name. Feeling legit!

My publisher is interested in offering a few free copies of the book to folks willing to post a quick review, blog post, etc. If you’re interested, just let me know.

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Smart App Banners in iOS 6

One of the less-discussed new features in iOS 6 is the ability to display Smart App banners in Safari. These banners allow you to provide a link to your iOS app from within the web browser. If visitors to your site already have your app installed, the Install button is replaced by an Open button, which makes it easy to jump from the webs site directly into the app. In addition, you’re able to pass information from your website to your app via a parameter in the Smart App Banner code. Let’s take a look at a quick example.

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iOS 6 in Education - Guided Access

Guided Access helps students with disabilities such as autism remain on task and focused on content. It allows a parent, teacher, or administrator to limit an iOS device to one app by disabling the Home button, as well as restrict touch input on certain areas of the screen. - Apple
Guided Access, one of many new features found in iOS 6, allows you to put your device in Kiosk mode, limiting access to other apps on the device. This feature can be useful for secure testing, keeping students on task, and more. In this post, we'll take a look at how to setup and use Guided Access on your device to limit access to a specific book in the iBooks app.

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D2L Edge Challenge

Watchalearning is a native iOS application that uses streaming video and chat functionality to facilitate learning. The main screen of the application shows a title, release date, and thumbnail image for each video in the series. Although the application looks for new content each time it is loaded, users can manually update the feed using pull-to refresh functionality on the main screen.

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iOS Application for Workshop Handouts

At the D2L UnConference I demoed an alpha version an iPad application I have been working on that is aimed at replacing traditional workshop handouts in the faculty training sessions I offer. The basic idea is that the app communicates with a web server to automatically display a PDF handout of the current workshop and also loads the sign-in and evaluation pages for that particular session. The app will hopefully eliminate unnecessary printouts and allow participants to more easily access to complementary workshop materials during sessions.

Since the conference I have completely rewritten the application, making it cross-platform (iPhone and iPad) and adding several new features. Let’s take a look at how the new version works!

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