I spent the first half of this week at the ANGEL User Conference in Cincinnati.
On the positive site, I got a chance to see where they are planning to go with the product in future versions. For example, 7.4 should have a rubric tool (to help with grading subjective assignments), they are planning to integrate searching for and including materials like YouTube videos and Flickr images, and they are adding tools to help instructors grade discussion forum assignments. I went to one pre-conference session where they showed their prototype for the rubric tool and I gave them some feedback on the design.
During the conference, I went to two sessions that were useful. In both sessions, the presenters were talking about ways that they were integrating other tools such as RSS feeds and Google Apps into ANGEL. I have a few things that I would like to try out -- I'm thinking there could be a way to have students submit feeds via a survey and have those feeds aggregated and displayed in ANGEL without instructor intervention. They also showed ways to create extra tabs in ANGEL courses (either within one course or throughout the institution).
They also picked some nice resturaunts and organized group reservations -- a nice touch for people who aren't familiar with Cincinnati. We ended up at Nicholson's (Scottish Tavern) the first night and Nada (Mexican) the second. Both were very good.
On the negative side:
They are sending out a survey this week. I plan to give them this feedback and suggest that they hold more open discussion sessions around particular technical/administrative issues (policies, scalability, K-12, medical schools, etc...).
They also announced that the next ANGEL User Conferences would be in Chicago (2009) and Florida (2010).
On the positive site, I got a chance to see where they are planning to go with the product in future versions. For example, 7.4 should have a rubric tool (to help with grading subjective assignments), they are planning to integrate searching for and including materials like YouTube videos and Flickr images, and they are adding tools to help instructors grade discussion forum assignments. I went to one pre-conference session where they showed their prototype for the rubric tool and I gave them some feedback on the design.
During the conference, I went to two sessions that were useful. In both sessions, the presenters were talking about ways that they were integrating other tools such as RSS feeds and Google Apps into ANGEL. I have a few things that I would like to try out -- I'm thinking there could be a way to have students submit feeds via a survey and have those feeds aggregated and displayed in ANGEL without instructor intervention. They also showed ways to create extra tabs in ANGEL courses (either within one course or throughout the institution).
They also picked some nice resturaunts and organized group reservations -- a nice touch for people who aren't familiar with Cincinnati. We ended up at Nicholson's (Scottish Tavern) the first night and Nada (Mexican) the second. Both were very good.
On the negative side:
- no wireless access
- lack of advanced-topic sessions
- no "What's new in ANGEL 7.3" pre-conference training (which I always found to be useful)
They are sending out a survey this week. I plan to give them this feedback and suggest that they hold more open discussion sessions around particular technical/administrative issues (policies, scalability, K-12, medical schools, etc...).
They also announced that the next ANGEL User Conferences would be in Chicago (2009) and Florida (2010).