The 2020 school year was unprecedented. The global pandemic caused almost every educational institution in the world to deal with the elimination of in-person classroom teaching and learning, almost overnight. This seismic shift meant that educators had to reimagine their classrooms online while providing high quality teaching experiences without missing stride. This shift was a … Read more
LMSPulse recently selected the top 10 plugins for Moodle in 2020. When selecting BigBlueButtonBN, they stated Perhaps the biggest Open Technology of 2020, the Blindside Networks team’s creation might have saved the school year at countless schools and for thousands —millions?— of students at no cost to their privacy. High praise indeed! We’ve worked on … Read more
Before Covid-19 most schools had a (relatively small) portion of their classes online. If you are an instructional technologist in higher ed, perhaps you had a series of online classes for professional development, or if you are a superintendent for a K-12, perhaps you had a virtual high school to ensure at-risk kids could still … Read more
We’ve been busy improving our features in the hosting of BigBlueButton in the past few months. This post gives you an update of what’s new in the Blindside Networks hosting for BigBlueButton. All of these features are now available in your sessions. 1. Who is Talking Whenever a user’s microphone generates audio, BigBlueButton now displays … Read more
As many of you know, browsers will stop supporting Adobe Flash at the end of 2020. In response, Blindside Networks has been transitioning from Flash to HTML5 for BigBlueButton (referred hereafter as simply “HTML5 client”). We completed the first step of this transition in September 2018 with the release of the HTML5 client for mobile … Read more
Summer is always the time which we release updates to our hosting environment for BigBlueButton. We want to cover three major updates coming soon: Personal Rooms HTML5 Mobile Client for Viewers Screen Sharing without Java Personal Rooms Customers have asked us for the ability to use BigBlueButton outside their learning management system (LMS). To enable … Read more
We recently added a document to our website describing our support for the upcoming General Data Protection Rights (GDPR) act, due to take effect May 25, 2018. See https://blindsidenetworks.com/gdpr/ Blindside Networks provides hosting to many organizations world-wide for BigBlueButton. This document describes, in plain language, the personal information we collect from a user, why we … Read more
Blindside Networks is pleased to announce the release of BigBlueButtonBN version 2.2.2, the BigBlueButton plugin for Moodle. This latest version fixes a number of minor bugs reported by our community. The BigBlueButtonBN plugin is heavily used by the Moodle Community. Moodle.org shows over 5,400 Moodle sites running the plugin shows it ranked #6 in overall downloads (from a … Read more
To give teachers more insight into student engagement during an online session we created a new recording format called Statistics Report. When a student participates in an online class BigBlueButton, will capture their user events (such as joining, leaving, chatting, raising hand, etc.) in order to create a playback file for the recorded session. For … Read more
Each year the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) holds an annual user conference. This year, six months after their user conference, they wanted to hold a NISOD virtual conference to enable more opportunities for collaboration and professional development amongst their members. NISOD used BigBlueButton and Blindside Networks to host their first virtual … Read more