https://trunk.tufts.edu

1. One-click Publishing of course site from Home page.
2. Collapsable tool menu to provide more display space.
3. Jump to selected tool in selected site
4. Home page link to Profile tool.

1. Drag and Drop tools to reorder the tool menu position.
2. Rename tools (perhaps in a different language?)
3. Remove a tool from the Tool menu

Students that upload an image to their Trunk Profile2 tool will have that image displayed in their Forums postings. (Note: This is not the student's ID image)

When selected, students must first post to a Forum Topic before they are allowed to read other student's posts.

Piazza is a Question and Answer discussion board that is uniquely designed to facilitate collaborative interaction among students.  It is designed to model face-to-face group discussions allowing for the creation of complex questions and complex answers.

Questions can be posed by both students and instructors and the answers are editable by both students and instructors. Students collaborate on answers in a wiki-like environment to create a single response to any question. Over time, students can enhance a response until a single high quality answer is reached. Answers can generate additional follow-up questions and and answers, adding clarity and depth to the original question/answer.

Piazza is a third-party online application accessible through a Trunk course or project site. Instructors can create a Piazza discussion board for their course site and students can join the discussion board through Trunk. Once a user has joined a course Piazza discussion board, they can access the discussion board either through Trunk or through Piazza.com

Some Piazza features:

• Much like Google Docs, Piazza updates in real time. Users can see answers develop as they are edited.
• Piazza offers free downloadable iOS and Android mobile apps allowing users access to their question and answer discussions remotely.
• Piazza provides support for anonymous posts
• Piazza provides support for formatting equations (LaTeX equations editor).
• Piazza provides support for the editing of computer code
• Piazza provides support for real time polling

Instructors might consider using a Piazza discussion board:

• As a vehicle for answering student questions, so all students can benefit from the questions posed by other students in the class.
• As an online wiki-like problem solving space for the whole class or for study groups
• As a vehicle to facilitate collaborative writing.
• As a "back channel" for large classes to allow TAs or co-instructors to monitor incoming student questions.
• As a means for instructors and students to stay connected in distance learning courses.

Instructors can use the Feedback tool to upload and distribute a comma-delimited (CSV) spreadsheet to present individual feedback and/or grades to students.

Instructors can upload as many feedback files as they want. Students only see their own individual feedback and/or grades.

The Feedback tool provides a convenient mechanism to post comments and grades for those instructors that regularly use Excel spreadsheet files to calculate grades. You might also use it to post class attendance records from a spreadsheet file.

The Lessons Builder tool allows instructors to deliver a guided sequence of content and activities to their students. It creates structured pages that pull content and functionality from other tools and organizes them as a series of sequential tasks.

Lessons pages may contain any of the following items:

1. Page title
2. Text item (i.e. content on the page)
3. Content links to items in Resources such as files or URLs
4. Links to published assessments
5. In-line question items on the page
6. Items may be designated as required
7. Links to forum topics
8. Student Comments on the page
9. Links to Student Pages where students may create their own content
10. Links to subpages
11. Items may have prerequisites (i.e. conditional release)

Resources Add/Upload file now has a drag and drop box.

Information entered under Actions/Edit Details is now displayed to students in Resources, if they click on the information icon.

"Make Library Link Available Off-Campus" automatically adds the URL extension for off-campus access.

Tests & Quizzes now organizes assessment versions onto tabs:

• Working Copies (not released to students), and
• Published Copies (released to students).

The Published Copies tab also includes 3 viewing options:

• All - includes both Active and Inactive assessments
• Active - assessments that are available to students
• Inactive - assessments that are no longer available to students

BCC is a good option to use if you need to send the same message to several students (for example, a message to all students that scored below 70 on an exam), but you don't want the students to know which other students also received the message. In such a case, select Instructor as the "To" recipient and the individual students as the "Bcc" recipients.

Permissions have been introduced into the Messages tool to provide greater control over who can use the tool and at what level.

The Portal Chat tool allows real-time synchronous text communication between 2 Trunk users. It is a type of internal instant messaging.

Users can chat with:

• Anyone on their Profile2 "Connections" that are currently logged into Trunk
• Anyone currently logged into the same Trunk course or project site.

The Portal Chat is accessed via a small "Chat" tab located at the bottom right of the Trunk display. If any of a user's Profile2 Connections are logged into Trunk or if anyone else is currently logged into the same Trunk course or project site, a number appears on the Chat tab indicating the number of users available for chat. Clicking on the Chat tab and then the user's name initiates the chat.

To access the new Help system, click on the "Help" button on any Trunk page.