The annual SLATE conference was held on Thursday and Friday of last week (October 9 and 10). SLATE is the Blackboard users group for the Chicagoland area. This conference has been growing every year; this year I found participants from as far away as Kansas, Nebraska, and the St. Louis area. While a few vendors attend—primarily those providing Building Blocks for Blackboard—the conference provides a balance between technology and pedagogy (how to employ the technology to achieve learning objectives).

Here are three things I took away from this year’s SLATE conference:

1. READI—an online test to measure a student’s readiness for online learning. This tool was presented by North Park University, where it has been employed both for their online students and as a faculty-development tool. READI, short for Readiness for Education At a Distance Indicator, provides the student with a report about his or her learning style, individual attributes, technical knowledge and competency, reading speed and comprehension, and typing speed and accuracy. In addition to the report—which also shows students how they compare to others who have taken the test—students are provided with links to helpful online resources.
2. EQUELLA—a learning-object repository that can be used with multiple types of content management systems. Southern New Hampshire University presented on how Equella is being used for its online courses.
3. Blogs and Wikis for Writing—Heath Tuttle from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln gave this informative presentation. While he is currently able to use the learning-objects Building Block in Blackboard, he started using Blogs and Wikis for his writing classes before that was available.