UBC Arts ISIT Blog

I'm currently trying out the assignment tool in Sakai and it has similar features as WebCT 4.1. In WebCT it is mandatoy to enter a maximum grade. In Sakai, you have an alternative to select ungraded, letter grades, points, pass/fail, and checkmark. I had a German professor ask me a couple of months ago before I was testing out Sakai that sometimes she doesn't want to make it mandatory for herself to enter marks. Every week she'd have the students submit in their assignments via WebCT, however, half the time they aren't for marks. The purpose was to have the students simply to complete the exercises because it would benefit them in their learning. I never thought of it that way but it makes sense to have more options available, in her case, the checkmark would do the trick.

It just occurred to me recently that Sakai doesn't support Safari. That's shocking news! One of our piloteers currently conducting her summer course is a Mac user. Most Mac users that I've run across mostly use Safari followed by Mozilla Firefox as their second preference. I was curious and visited Sakaiproject.org and webct.com just to compare which CMS platform is more widely supported for Mac.

Sakai:
* Macintosh:
o Netscape 7.1 and newer
o Mozilla Firefox

WebCT 4.1
* Macintosh:
o Microsoft IE 5.1 (OS 9.x and OS X 10.1) and 5.2 (OS X 10.1, 10.2, 10.3)
o Netscape 6.2.x (OS 9.x and OS X), 7.0 & 7.1 (OS X)
o AOL OS X
o Mozilla 1.5, 1.6 (OS X)
o Safari 1.2

Sakai 2.1.2 has a new Wiki tool that 2.1.1 didn't have. It was about time that a CMS had that feature. With Wikipedia being popular and allowing people from all around the world to make contributions, it's also been something that instructors would like to have made available to their students. Since WebCT 4.1 doesn't have one, Sakai 2.1.2 would now be more appealing to those that want to us Wikis. As a work-around to WebCT users, we've recommended instructors to use a commercial product and have that linked to their course. I guess now I can contact the instructors and have them be part of my 'piloteers' to test out Sakai!

Another opportunity to learn, share and collaborate with the community! The 2006 Canadian WebCT E-Learning Conference will be happening next month from June 19-22. I will be one of the presenters presenting "Integrating Rich Media Presentation in WebCT to Enhance Teaching and Learning"

If you are interested in registering for this event and would like to see what others are presenting along with their descriptions, you can find all the details here at http://www.ualberta.ca/WEBCT/conference/2006/

Just wanted to let the community know that there is an upcoming Sakai conference in Vancouver, BC at the end of this month. The conference will run from May 30-June 2. Uli Rauch our director will be one of the program co-chairs. Tim Wang along with myself will be one of the presenters presenting "Integrating Rich Media Presentation in Sakai to Enhance Teaching and Learning"

This will be a great opportunity for us all to share, learn, make connections and collaborate!

Follow the link below to register and for more details on the conference

http://www.sakaiproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=169&Itemid=518

This vocabulary memorization platform is designed to help students memorizing the spelling of words from having fun playing a series games. The Flash Card Tool is one of the many tools in this platform. The Installation Package has just been released. Please feel free to download them and try it out on your own servers.