Month: September 2016

Gravity Forms at sites.psu.edu going “bye bye”?

I’ve been working with Ryan Wetzel on building a tool for faculty that will hopefully help them to understand options for using video content for instructional purposes.

We began this project almost a year ago, before CampusPress took over the duty of hosting our Penn State WordPress sites. The transition has been rocky for me as I’ve blogged about in earlier entries.

The newest hiccup is that there are apparently issues with Gravity Forms on this new platform. I’ll share Ryan’s assessment of what he has seen…

For us, Gravity Forms is still working more or less as it is supposed to, however we are getting locked out of forms with no way to unlock them to edit content. Campuspress recommends we clone the form and delete the original whenever this happens then replace the form ID with the new form ID on the page where the form is located. This works for awhile until the form locks us out again.

My staff has been working on duplicating our existing forms in Formidable. It mostly does the same stuff however it formats dates and time in strange ways and allows the user to submit incorrect data (rather than supply a calendar or limiting selections to real HH:MM selections).

It’s hard to say about the conditional logical until we actually spend time building something out with it. However I do believe that Campuspress plans on doing away with Gravity Forms at some point, not sure when, and that Formidable is their forms platform going forward.

I began porting our content over from Gravity Forms into Formidable Forms this morning. Thankfully the process has gone well so far. At worst, this will be additional work because we have to copy and paste all of the content from one form into another. There is not automatic export-import function from what I can tell.

We’ll keep pushing ahead for the time being and hope that all goes well. Do you have any experiences with either Gravity Forms or Formidable? Has your transition to CampusPress gone well?

VoiceThread LTI and Canvas

I believe it was sometime earlier this summer that the University turned on the connection (LTI) between VoiceThread and Canvas. This new connection provided new VoiceThread features in Canvas and easier access to VoiceThread from Canvas. VoiceThread has published some useful information for faculty on how the LTI works.

My initial impressions are that the implementation is somewhat unintuitive, mostly due to VT’s unique UX design approach.

My colleague, Chris Gamrat, soon discovered that the LTI is not compatible with group assignments. The tool is apparently designed for submitting individual work or projects created in VoiceThread. This is a problem for our College because we stress group work heavily, regardless of whether the course is being delivered online or in residence.

My work around still uses the VT LTI, but not the way you normally create an assignment in Canvas.

Please read these directions for creating a VT assignment in Canvas.

I do not use the VoiceThread LTI “Assignment Builder” option to build group assignments (again, because this really isn’t a option).

Screencast: How to build group VoiceThread assignments in Canvas (13:47)

What I do in the class that I support that requires group VT assignments is to:

  1. Use the External Tool to create a link to the VT Home
    1. The assignment cannot be ungraded or you will lose the ability to select the VoiceThread LTI (i.e. Points: 0; Assignment Group: Ungraded; Display Grade as: Complete/Incomplete)
    2. Use the description text box to add basic instructions like “Use area to work in your group to create, edit, and comment on your collaborative VoiceThread.”
    3. Provide instructions on how groups can provide editing access to all memeber of a group (i.e. “For group VoiceThreads, you will need to have someone create a VoiceThread and then grant the other members of your group editing rights to that VoiceThread. How to grant editing access to other individuals in your group – https://voicethread.com/howto/sharing-with-an-individual/”)
  2. From there, students work in groups to create, edit, and comment on their collaborative VT
  3. Once students have finished working on their project, they can submit a share link to a new Canvas Assignment that has been configured as a group assignment
    1. Provide instruction on sharing a VoiceThread URL (i.e. “Useful guide: How to share your VoiceThread – https://voicethread.com/howto/getting-a-share-link-2/”)
    2. Recommended: allow students to submit a document along with their share link (i.e. “The MS PowerPoint document, with transcripts on each slide, that was used to create your VoiceThread” this is useful for accessibility reasons)
    3. Recommended: communicate your grading rubric
    4. Adjust the Canvas Assignment settings (i.e. Points; Submission Type: Website URL, File Uploads; Group Assignment: This is a Group Assignment; Assign: Due [date])
    5. Optional: Creating useful “external” links from the Canvas Modules view
      1. https://voicethread.com/howto/category/creating-web-application/
      2. https://voicethread.com/howto/sharing-with-an-individual/
      3. https://voicethread.com/howto/getting-a-share-link-2/
  4. The faculty can then use the SpeedGrader to grade the submissions as they would most other assignments
    1. Comments and feedback related to assessment will need to be left in the comments field in the right column of the SpeedGrader

Have I forgotten anything? Do you have another way to use the VoiceThread LTI and Group Assignments? Please leave your comments below.

See also my related post “Using VoiceThread” from 9/7/16

Using VoiceThread

Dr. Chu stopped by my office with a question about opensource options for recording lectures that he may want to share with his students while he is traveling.

I sat down with him at my computer and walked through how to use VoiceThread. I had the foresight to record the session (22 min 06 sec) in case he would like to refer to it for future use.

I cover the following topics:

  • creating / uploading content
  • commenting / recording
  • sharing
  • editing existing VoiceThreads
  • uploading video content
  • commenting on video content

There are some excellent guides online with more information at https://voicethread.com/howto/category/web-application/.

I would also like to mention best practices when preparing to record. I have created an Evernote with a section on recording best practices.

Where’s my site?

A couple of days ago, I went to return to my blog to post something about participating in Jake’s ADG back in August, when to my surprise, I had lost access to my site! It looked like it was deleted 🙁

The support team at CampusPress quickly restored my with a brief explanation, “This looks like a strange cache issue that shouldn’t happen again.” Well, I hope not.

They are actually still looking into the problem because I cannot view the site from my list of sites. I’ve recorded a screencast of the problem: https://youtu.be/mahzuW5qYos. Hopefully, they will be able to fix the problem quickly.

This raises a couple of new questions.

  1. What is my backup strategy? I don’t have one now, but you can bet that I’m going to look into how I can export my site and save archives of it if possible. WordPress is capable of that.
  2. Are there any other missing sites? I can’t seem to find any missing sites, but I might just be forgetting something.

UPDATE! I just realized that my site was listed there, but with the same title as the “main” sites.psu.edu site. So, what I thought was a duplicate before is actually my site. I have to see if I can rename the listing so that it stands out differently, but it looks like things might be OK.

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