Instructional Technology Makes Everything So Easy

1. The instructor with a hearing disability has a Deaf student. Since I am a computer expert, can I add the support person from disability services to the Blackboard site for the instructor's course?


2. I wrote

   Remember that you access WebAssign through Blackboard. Log on to Blackboard via [link to Blackboard], click on Calculus Lecture, and the WebAssign link will be in the left sidebar.

   Stu responds, "Where can you find the web assign homeworks?"


3. Stu2 wants an extention until Friday or Saturday on the WebAssign because his student loan money hasn't come in yet. I write back explaining that there is a two-week free trial on WebAssign (we are in week 1) -- which he would have figured out if he had paid attention to my WebAssign demo in class or even tried clicking on the WebAssign link in Blackboard.


4. Stu3 can not get her computer to print pdfs and what do I suggest? Instead of writing back "Get a Mac," I send her to the help desk in the library.


5. WebAssign is marking right answers wrong. My TA discovered this. This was independently confirmed by The Topologist (who is friends with one of my students*). I have emailed our WebAssign guru. I am awaiting more information before I email the class because I don't want to have to trash talk the mandatory online homework system during the first week.

*Yesterday I was planning for the class that doesn't meet until Tuesday (damn, really need to make copies of that syllabus) at the bad bakery, and The Topologist, my calculus student, and a grad student (who is not my TA) showed up there for lunch, and then the three of them all went off to spend the day doing yard work at someone else's house.