How to easily add a piece of re-usable text using a Macro

In Angel, anywhere where you can add text, whether that is the discussion forum, adding a new page, or providing feedback to students on an assignment, you have access to the formatting bar. This bar  contains a button to insert or edit a macro (see screen shot below). So let’s say you find yourself always repeating several sentences to students in your assignment feedback area, the discussion forum, or anywhere else where there is verbal repetition. You can simply create a macro and whenever you need it, insert it inside a text window. There is even an option to share this macro in other courses, and with other users of Angel.

1. Go into a text area, for example, the settings  for a dropbox.
2. Click the Insert/Edit Macro button
   

   Formatting Bar in Angel contains Macro Button

3. Click on the, “New Macro” tab in the pop-up window.
4. Enter a name, the text that you will be re-using, and create a category (click the button to the right of the category to create a new category) if you will be using this a lot.
   

   New Macro

5. Then click Save.
6. Whenever you wish to use the macro you created, click on the macro button in the formatting bar, select the macro you wish to use, and click OK. Below is an example Macro.
   

   Existing Macro ready for insertion

   

High Security Exams in Angel

(This tip provided by WSU DDP)

Angel Secure Browser works well for its intended purpose – on a Testing Lab workstation or a Proctor’s workstation. Launching Secure Browser does not close other running programs, so the Proctor should close them before launching. This is precautionary because they’re still hidden/inaccessible, but any unrecognized programs could be screen-capture software (like Wink) which is not blocked.

For students taking an assessment with Secure Browser, access to the Windows Registry is necessary. A proctor will need to login to the workstation or have the student login and then use a (right-click) “Run as …” on the Secure Browser to launch it as an administrator account.

Secure Browser relies on Internet Explorer on Windows, so if there is http addressed content (like an image on another website) placed in an assessment, there will be a message about viewing insecure content because our Angel server uses https (http secure).

Links to Wikipedia or similar sites within an assessment are wide-open search possibilities. Searching Wikipedia for “Google”, you can click the homepage link to Google and link anywhere. It’s best not to include a link of this kind in the instructions of an assessment or in the question text.

After the assessment is submitted and graded, the student cannot Review their assessment and the answer key without using the Secure Browser to access the assessment. An option to avoid this problem is to use the assessment Settings >> Access tab’s Browser Security set to “None – no browser security imposed” after the assessment take-period (Interaction tab >> Disable date) has passed.

Some other reasons not to install Secure Browser on a student’s workstation or laptop:

1. Hardware virtual machines make it possible to share the resources of workstation to host guest operating systems. With two isolated operating systems, it’s possible to quickly switch from one operating sytem running a secure browser to a second operating system running other browsers and instant messaging chat clients.
2. Remote Desktop can be used to access a workstation running Secure Browser while the laptop or workstation controlling the session still has access to browsers and instant messaging chat.
3. Configuration settings used in running Secure Browser may affect Internet Explorer behavior using Angel. If you see a stripped down login for Angel where you can only access the courses with High Security assessments, please clear your browser cache.
4. Password information is stored locally on the computer in a file called browser.cfg typically located in C:\Program Files\CyberLearning Labs, Inc\SecureBrowser. If the password is forgotten, delete the browser.cfg file and launching Secure Browser will prompt you for a new password.

Using the Angel Secure Brower with a Proctor is more secure than the Medium security setting of an Assessment because it can “lock” a student into the assessment window. Students won’t be able to close the browser or click somewhere outside of the assessment.

More information and to download the browser:

http://angel.wsu.edu/secureBrowser.html

7.4 Preview video clip

7.4 preview video

http://angel.wsu.edu/Tutorials/IntroAngel7_4/IntroAngel7_4.html

Enabling the new grading terms on Angel 7.4

The new grade book for Angel 7.4 is an optional component you can enable by following these directions below:

1. Go to your course

2. Click on the Manage tab

3. Click on, “Environment Variables” under Course Settings

4. Click on, “Add a Variable”

5. Under the Variable Name field, enter

ENABLE_GRADING_TERMS

6. Under Variable Value, enter 1 (see screen shot below)

7. Click Save (When you return to your grade book, you will see the new grade book setup)

Adding the "Grading Terms" Variable

How to view all forum posts of a particular student

To view all posts for a particular student in a forum, go to the forum and click on the “search view” from the drop-down menu (see screen shot below). Then select the check box, “Show Advanced Search”, make sure there are no spaces in the search box. Then select the author or student that you wish to see all posts for. Then click the search button, and it will find all posts by that student for that forum.

How to change your view to “advanced user” all the time

Unless you have changed it, the default setting for instructors in Angel is the, “Normal” user level setting. If you find yourself changing this to advanced often, in order to get to the extra settings, you will want to change your Angel user level to advanced.

• Click on the Preferences icon in the left powerstrip navigation,
• Select “System Settings”.
• From the next screen, select “Advanced”, for user level, and click Save.
  

  Selecting advanced user level

How to view all forum posts of a particular student

To view all posts for a particular student in a discussion forum.

• Go to the forum and click on the “search view” from the drop-down menu (see screenshot below).
• Select the check box, “Show Advanced Search” and make sure there are no spaces in the search box.
• Select the author or student that you wish to see all posts for.
• Click the search button.
• Angel will find all posts by that student for that forum.

Viewing all of a student posts (click to enlarge screenshot)

We filed an enhancement request with Angel to be able to find all posts for a student in all the forums within a course. Currently you can only find all the posts for a student in a particular forum within a course, not all forums.

Helpful Folder and Grade Book Organization

One of the preventable issues causing confusion for some students, is trouble finding out where course content lives.  The student may then end up calling helpdesk or the instructor. Below are some ideas to help (those of you who have student call issues) organize your course lessons area, in order to reduce calls from students. The following shows a schedule based Folder organization, but the same general idea applies to organizing a theme based folder setup under lessons.

To further clarify the schedule based folder grouping, some may choose to add the date for each week in parentheses, as well as add an extra subtitle which may help provide extra context as to the contents of the folder, see screenshot example below. If you end up adding dates to the folder title, and the course is re-used from semester to semester, the dates may need adjusting each semester. To change the titles and subtitles, go into the folder settings and changing the folder title and/or subtitle.

Weekly based folder schedule

The screenshot below shows an example of weekly folder contents. When adding to your weekly folders, add all your course content in an order that works for you, such as assignment, quiz, powerpoint, etc. Use the same content type sequence for each folder for consistency.

Folder contents organization

Gradebook Organization

Below shows an example on how to organize your gradebook categories using weighting. (Go to gradebook >> Categories under gradebook management). As you can see in the screenshot below, each main category is worth 25 percent of the total grade (this example is a percentage based grade book setup). Once you have added categories, you can start adding assignments into each category. If you have a points based grade book, you can still use the categories for organization purposes, however, Angel will simply total the points for all assignments, and divide that with the total points possible times 100 to establish the final grade.

Using Grade Book Categories (click images to enlarge)

You can then assign a category to the assignments as you can see below. Click the checkbox to the left of an assignment and then click “edit selected” below to edit that assignment or change the associated category.

Category and Assignments

Pasting text from Word, Web pages, or emails into Angel announcements

To paste from Word or other word processing program:

1. Go to your word processor or web page, highlight the relevant text and click: Edit >> copy or use keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C
2. Rather than right-clicking and pasting, or Ctrl+V to paste inside the text box, use the dropdown menu on the right of the paste icon in the text editor in the Angel text box, and select “Paste as plain text” (see screenshot below).
   

   Pasting as plain text into Announcements (click on image to enlarge)

3. Once you paste as plain text you can apply formatting using the Angel formatting bar.

Exporting Gradebook

1. Go to your course, and click the Manage tab, then select “Grade book”.
2. Click on “Export Grades” (see screen shot below)
3. On the next page, make your selections of the choices presented.
4. Click the “Export” button to either open or save the file to your hard drive.
5. You can now open the exported file with Excel or any other spreadsheet program.

Export Gradebook link (click to enlarge)