next »

[psychdiva]

I want to use some of Bb's features in an on-ground course this coming fall term but I won't have time to take my school's "intro to Bb" workshop this summer. I'm reasonably adept at learning new technology. Is it possible to learning to use Bb's features from the documentation alone? I know that online teaching has its own pedagogy and I know the documentation won't teach me that, but is it enough to get me started in using a few features?

[voxprincipalis]

Yes.

I can't stand going to software seminars. I learn much faster on my own. It is entirely possible to learn most of what you need to know to make Blackboard work by just poking at it.

VP

[noof_]

I want to use some of Bb's features in an on-ground course this coming fall term but I won't have time to take my school's "intro to Bb" workshop this summer. I'm reasonably adept at learning new technology. Is it possible to learning to use Bb's features from the documentation alone? I know that online teaching has its own pedagogy and I know the documentation won't teach me that, but is it enough to get me started in using a few features?

Second.

Contact your U tech help center if you have a specific question.

[psychdiva]

Phew. I too hate software workshops. The ones at my school are so elementary - they often begin with an earnest statement like, "This is a mouse."

A few more questions...

  - What features of Bb are most useful in complementing an on-ground course?

  - I work on a Mac and my documents are created with MS Word, saved with the ".doc" suffix. Is Bb going to work smoothly when I post documents for my students?

  - My school is upgrading to a new version of Bb. What happens if I set up my course this summer on the old version but the new version is what's running in the fall?

Thanks for the help.

[carebearstare]

Phew. I too hate software workshops. The ones at my school are so elementary - they often begin with an earnest statement like, "This is a mouse."

A few more questions...

  - What features of Bb are most useful in complementing an on-ground course?

  - I work on a Mac and my documents are created with MS Word, saved with the ".doc" suffix. Is Bb going to work smoothly when I post documents for my students?

  - My school is upgrading to a new version of Bb. What happens if I set up my course this summer on the old version but the new version is what's running in the fall?

Thanks for the help.

I am a big fan of the discussion boards on BB as a way to compliment in class discussion. There are lots of ways you can do this, depending on the nature of the class. What course are you teaching?

BB is also good for putting up external links and documents, having virtual office hours, and submitting course assignments. I also use it to put up announcements about class (changes to the syllabus, etc.).

For documents, the easiest thing to do is to save them as webpages and post them that way. If you choose "Save As" you should be able to decide to save your file as a web file (htm or html). I'm not a Mac person but this should go around any compatibility issues that may arise.

I'm not sure about the old/new version question, but most of the time software upgrades take note of this and address any compatibility issues so you won't have to.

[systeme_d_]

psychdiva,

I've never done the workshop, and I use Blackboard like a pro.  It's mostly intuitive.

And in my experience, everything migrates just fine when the university upgrades to a new version.  You may have to "archive" and "import" the old version.  Or not.

[pandora]

Ditto VP and others, very easy to figure out through trial and error.  I've never done a workshop or even the little tutorials, and I have no special instincts for this stuff, but my students felt that our Bb site was better than ones they had in other classes.  A few other comments:

Discussion Boards:  I can't stand anything about these, how crappy they look (esp. on my Mac), how students whine about how they can't figure them out, having to check them to see what students have posted.  I had a more successful experience with this feature on Moodle, but I still felt annoyed about having to monitor.  Other people have probably had more success with them, but I don't care for this component.

Word Documents:  yes, I've had no problem posting documents, just so long as I remember to add the ".doc" (which I occasionally forget).  The bigger headache I've run into during the past year is when students using Vista (ugh) post their own papers to the Digital Dropbox (see below) and the suffix is ".docx" -- which I cannot open.  And which I suspect Microsoft did on purpose just to be a bunch of ---wipes.  Students forget to fix the document name to ".doc" _all_ the time.

Digital Dropbox:  I love this component, although it could be cleaner and more effectively designed.  Essentially, students can submit word documents into this little "box" -- which is so much more convenient than having them email me attachments and clogging up my inbox.  I use it as a back-up for anything they submit to me (papers, exams, weekly commentaries) and a way to confirm that they submitted the paper by the deadline.  It's also very handy for downloading a fishy paper to scan it through the plagiarizing software (if your campus has it).  A few of them take a while to figure it out -- they can get confused about uploading a document into their own account versus actually sending it to my account, so just be aware of that potential problem.

And just as a minor design issue:  when I choose a "banner" for the layout of my Bb homepage / announcements page (that's listed under Course Design), I usually just download some image related to whatever we're reading for that class.  That will appear at the top of the page above the Announcements.  And I tell students that when I've changed the image, that means there is new info. that I've posted.

[dept_geek]

  - What features of Bb are most useful in complementing an on-ground course?

Announcements section, turning in assignments (*), gradebooks

  - I work on a Mac and my documents are created with MS Word, saved with the ".doc" suffix. Is Bb going to work smoothly when I post documents for my students?

If you are on a Mac, save the documents as PDF. Then it will always work smoothly. .docx is from Office 2007 (not Vista!). Be warned the Mac Office 2008 *may* (haven't researched it yet.. but mostly likely will to make it compatabile with Office 2007) also have docx (**) things. Can't go wrong with PDF. Don't use Word's HTML. It's not very compatable with anything but IE. (Firefox will choke on it)

  - My school is upgrading to a new version of Bb. What happens if I set up my course this summer on the old version but the new version is what's running in the fall?

In theory, nothing. Everything should be OK. In reality, be prepared to spend some time tweaking and making sure everything came across OK.

You can get rid of most of the issues with the text editing thing ("Visual Text Box Editor") by turning off the various options. Tools -> Personal Information -> Set Visual Text Box Editor Options. (Make unavailable).

The discussion board is not so great. It was better in BB6, they messed it up in BB7. BB8 is supposed to be back the way it was.

Anyway, BB is not too hard. Give yourself time to play.

(*) Pandora mentions the digital drop box. We have had much more success with the Assignment feature. You can comment and grade in the same interface, and the grade is automagically placed in the gradebook. You can also upload files. Then the students see your comments, any files you uploaded, and the grade all in one place. I found it much easier to deal with than the dropbox.

(**) The underlying file format is completely different.  They didn't change the file extension just to annoy people.

[booking]

All the above advice is good, and for a Mac user who just found out about how to make .pdfs in the past year, it is really essential when going with BB and cross-platform issues.

If you don't know how to make a .pdf, you can go to "print" in your Word menu and then "Print to .pdf".  Should work like a charm.

I was getting the .docx from my students and I made it a requirement for them to save their files as .doc or .pdf.  Ones who didn't had 5 points deducted, as I had to send their files to zamzar or some other service.

You can get mac-compatible .docx patches for Word, but I don't have that yet. . .

[pandora]

Thanks for the suggestions and corrections above -- that will certainly help to avoid other headaches next fall.

[psychdiva]

And just as a minor design issue:  when I choose a "banner" for the layout of my Bb homepage / announcements page (that's listed under Course Design), I usually just download some image related to whatever we're reading for that class.  That will appear at the top of the page above the Announcements.  And I tell students that when I've changed the image, that means there is new info. that I've posted.

pandora, for the designs you upload, what format do you look for? Are those jpegs? Any good sources for banner designs? Thanks.  P.

[psychdiva]

What course are you teaching?

It's an upper-level social science course, with some content and some technical skills.

[pandora]

pandora, for the designs you upload, what format do you look for? Are those jpegs? Any good sources for banner designs? Thanks.  P.

Oh, they're just regular images -- jpeg, gif, pdf -- that appear at the top of the page.  I think the first time I used Bb I thought you were supposed to post something that looked like an actual "banner."  But it's just a space on the page for inserting images.  I teach lit so I use whatever strikes me as fun -- portraits of authors, paintings, cartoons, etc. related to whatever we're reading.  The only hitch about selecting images is that they shouldn't be too large or they take too long to load onto the page when a student checks the announcements page -- thus interfering with the primary purpose of the site.

[larryc]

No workshops, no reading the documentation unless you get stuck. Just get int htere and start mucking around. If a colleague with a good BB site would let you log in to hers that would be helpful.

[magistra]

The workshops are definitely not worth it.  Call with specific questions if you have them.

I put up the syllabus and handouts in Course Documents.  I'll also have a section for links to other websites (you can add sections to the menu).  I'll also put up assignments, but that tends to mean that I put the handout with the requirements in Course Documents -- if I don't usually post things in Assignments, they'll never look there.  They also don't seem to pay much attention to announcements.  I do love the e-mail function, though, and Turnitin (if your school has it).  I've found that they don't use the Discussion Boards unless they have a real need, i.e. their grade is dependent on it.  Of course, each class is different, so you may want to experiment.

You can start with just putting up your syllabus and major handouts, though, and that'll be fine.  Lots of profs don't use it at all, and I find students can be oddly disinclined to use it.  I sometimes think that the course website just made more work for me, as well as for them (but especially for me!)  You will not need a workshop to do so little -- you'll figure it out in minutes -- and then you can play around and build your site as needed.