Hi there! When I have office hours, I try to use the Wimba Classroom.  Schools block downloading and installing Pronto sometimes.  To the best of my knowledge, the Wimba Classroom, however, should work on any computer in any school.  (Please correct me if I’m wrong about that in the comments below.)

In order to make it simple to access the Wimba Classroom for students, I put a button on the left hand side of my course that takes students directly there. I got the idea from the elluminate button in my IQ Academy courses (great folks out there at IQ Academy in Washington!).

The thing is, I work from home and am often sitting in front of my computer grading or clicking on things “to clean up my classroom.” I wanted to be available for students for synchronous contact then too, not only when I’m supposed to be holding office hours!

My first step was to create a scrolling Marquee across the top of the Announcements. Here is the HTML (and brief instructions) to create the same Announcement in your classroom.

1. open your course in firefox and go to the announcements through the control panel.
2. add a new announcement, and call it Please
3. hit the <> key, which tells Blackboard to read the html
4. insert without the semi-colons:

;<font size=”14″><font color=”#ffff00″><marquee bgcolor=”#0000ff”>Please read the Announcements daily. Thanks</marquee></font></font>

Notice you can change the text in the scrolling marquee just by changing the text in the html code.  You can also change the color by changing the FFFFOO to other colors.

Still struggling with my rudimentary knowledge, I managed to write a script using AutoHotkey that would, with the click of a button, open my courses, go to announcements, change the announcement to a different color, and change the text to “Shu is now available LIVE!  Hit “live teacher access” on the left!”

I named the button “live teacher access” rather than Wimba Classroom to keep it simple for students.  Now, I can quickly ‘log into’ the classroom when I’m in front of the computer, and I can ‘log out’ the same way.  I have a multi-monitor set up, so I just leave the Wimba classroom open on one monitor.

This is a really efficient way to be available.  I haven’t gotten many students to log in and participate, but I have heard that they appreciate knowing I’m there just in case.