Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[ Silence ]
>> Hi. This is Cathy, and today I'm going to talk
about one small piece of Angel, and that is the courses nugget
that you can see on the left side of the screen.
I have logged into Angel to get
to the point where I can see this.
I'd like to thank one of our faculty members for allowing me
to show their particular list of classes here
as well, so thank you, Julie.
You'll see in the courses nugget here,
the way this one is organized at the very top I have F09,
down a little bit I have NA, and then S10,
and those are abbreviations that stand for something.
F09 is Fall, 2009, so those are the classes
that this person has listed for that quarter.
NA stands for not applicable, and this is often
where we have practice courses or things like that.
S10 is Spring 2010.
SU09 is Spring 2009.
SU10 is Summer 2010, and on and on and on.
Now, one of the things I want to show you is some
of the ways you can customize this nugget
and make your life easier, for one thing,
you'll notice the word courses,
and underneath it I have two links, find a course,
which isn't really too useful,
it lets you the find the courses you are already in,
which are probably going to be listed anyway.
Load tasks, however, is interesting.
When you first log into Angel, as I have here,
I may or may not have chosen to show task,
this particular list does show task,
but when you first connect, every time,
you have to ask Angel to load task, and this is just a way
of keeping the processing load of Angel down.
If you don't want them, you don't load them.
If you do, you load them.
So I'm going to click on load tasks, and the screen flashes,
and now you'll see extra things show up, little,
funny icons that look like perhaps a clipboard, or email,
or a flag, or a little folder, and I'm going
to show you what those are in a second.
So let's talk some more about what we see at the top here
of this nugget, I see the word courses, and as I go off
to the right, there's a series of buttons,
those buttons only show, however,
when my mouse is hovering over that green bar,
in this case, at the top.
So I'm going to start at the far right and talk about these.
The far right button shows a new window,
it will open the courses nugget in a new window,
not really sure what value that has, but there it is.
The next one as I move to the left allows me
to really minimize this nugget or not, so if I click on it,
you'll see it got much, much smaller.
And if I click on it again, it comes back.
The next button as I move to the left is refresh, if you wanted
to get the latest version of the courses,
perhaps a new course was just set up, you just got
in the course and you're already in Angel and it doesn't show,
you may need to refresh this nugget so it shows,
but the most important of these is the very first one
on the left edge, and that is settings, this allows me
to customize how this nugget looks, it looks --
the icon looks like a little pencil.
I'm going to click on the pencil.
And this is where you see a whole bunch of cool stuff now.
You'll see for this particular teacher, there are a list
of classes, Fall '09 again at the top, NA,
Spring 2009, Spring 2010.
I'm going to scroll down, because way down at the bottom,
let me move just a little bit more, here's where you get
to the good stuff on here.
The settings at the bottom affect all the classes at once,
all the classes in your nugget, you can choose
to have them grouped by semester.
And here at Centralia College, we sure call things quarters,
but it works the same way here.
I think it's grouped by term basically,
so this allows all the Winter quarter classes to be together
and all the Summer 2010 to be together, very nice.
You can also choose to display your role in a particular class,
and let me go back and show you what that looks like.
You'll see in this list
of classes the role says instructor,
that's this person's role in a class,
'cause certainly I could be a teacher in this class
and I could be a student in another class,
and those would both show.
Let me go back, you can't quite see it, but I'm going to click
on the pencil again and scroll down.
Category, let's you see the category of the classes.
The category isn't too useful, I don't think, it will say things
like is it a course, or perhaps a practice course,
I'm not so sure how much value that is.
Instructor could be interesting
if you're a student you could actually see your teacher's name
for the various courses.
If you're a teacher, it's going to show your name everywhere
which isn't too much value, but it might be if you're a student.
Semester will show the semester of the class,
and since we're already grouped by semester, or again,
quarter for us, I don't see that that has much value.
One of the interesting ones you can show are tasks.
I mentioned at the front that we were seeing little icons
that look like flags and folders, those are tasks.
You can choose to show ungraded items,
mail that you haven't looked at,
posts for discussion forums you haven't look at, milestones
and tasks, and that's what this teacher has shown,
has chosen to have showing,
so let me show you what those look like.
You'll see here as I'm looking at this first class
for Fall 2009, tasks are showing.
The little clipboard is the first task shown,
and if I hover my mouse on it,
it says there are six ungraded items,
now this is a really old class from Fall 2009,
so certainly these may be things turned in way past due dates
and that's why they're not graded.
If I choose the next icon,
it tells me there are six mail messages I haven't read.
Again, it's an old class, so it doesn't really mean too much.
If I go down to the next class show,
it shows I have five ungraded items,
eight mail messages, three milestones.
Now, milestones are things which a teacher can add to a class
that indicate when something is due,
when something has been completed,
or perhaps it's past due.
Now some teachers use these, some do not.
It makes things show in your calendar within Angel,
so it can be handy, and might be useful, it might not be.
The last little icon looks like a folder with a pushpin in it,
that's discussion posts,
so for this particular teacher there are sixteen unread
discussion posts.
Again, a very old class, so that's totally possible,
so these can be very handy little icons.
Some of these when you click on them,
it takes you right to the item.
Sometimes it doesn't.
So let me show you, for example,
I'm going to these five ungraded items.
I'm just going to click on this little tiny icon,
the screen's going to flash, it's going to actually put me
into the class, and you can see over here
on the right-hand side were the things that need to be graded,
and that's kind of cool.
Let me go back home.
Let me show you also the email messages.
I'm going to click on mail messages.
Click. It's going to take me into the class,
it's going to take me to my maill, which you can kind
of see here on the right-hand side, a little bit
of the screen shot, and I can see my messages.
So, again, very handy.
I'm going to go back home.
Now, the other ones don't work as well, frankly.
The milestones doesn't take me to the milestones,
and I can't see that the discussion forum takes me
to the discussion forums either,
but it does open the class up for me.
So, hm, the first two I find much more useful as far
as getting me to the things I need to look at.
The other two are,
are informational items and can be very nice.
So let's go back to settings, I'm going to go up back
to the top, you cannot quite see and click on the pencil again.
I'm going to scroll down again to these generic settings
for all your classes, and the last one that's interesting is
show disabled.
A disabled class is a class
in which students can no longer enroll,
so it might be an old class, it might be a practice class
that people cannot enroll in.
So, often you don't want
to bother seeing those 'cause they're not really active right
now, so I want to see them, I click yes, if I don't want
to see them, I click no, and then of course I would save.
I'm going to set this back the way it was
for this particular teacher.
So, again, the bottom settings affect all the courses shown.
I'm going to scroll up a little bit.
One thing that is nice about these classes
that we're seeing is you can also uncheck in front of them
so that it doesn't show, whether it's disables or not, or Summer
or Fall, if you just don't want to see it anymore,
you can uncheck them and they won't show in the list anymore,
they're still here, you can get back to it,
you can still make them show should you want to,
but they don't necessarily show all the time.
So that's one way to hide the clutter.
If you just don't want to see stuff anymore, it's old,
why am I still seeing it?
Uncheck it, scroll down to the bottom, and click save.
So I'm hoping some of this will help you customize how your
courses show within the courses nugget 'cause it can be very
useful, especially if you start reducing the clutter a little
bit, and show just the things you want
and just the informational items you need.
So I hope this helps.