Blackboard has a NEW Calendar feature to help you keep track of due dates in your courses. As professors add material and assignments to the course, along with due dates for those items, they will appear on your calendar color coordinated for the course. You also can add your personal entries to the calendar. If you would like, you can link the calendar to an outside calendar as well so that you do not miss any deadlines this semester. Check out the video below and the link to additional functionality of the calendar.
Author: Jon Page 10 of 24
Hopefully it was a very productive summer for all. As we turn our attention to Fall 2013, it is time for faculty to request Blackboard courses and for students to get back up to speed on how to turn in assignments, contribute to discussion groups, take online assessments, and retrieve content from Blackboard.
Faculty should take a look at this post on how to request your Blackboard course. If you have any questions or concerns, please send an email to blackboard@richmond.edu or call 287-6860.
For students (or anyone needing a refresher), check out the Atomic Learning videos about the tools in Blackboard. You can access Atomic Learning within Blackboard on the “My Blackboard” page or by visiting http://is.richmond.edu/training/tutorials.html.
You will notice a new look when you log into Blackboard! There is a new screen that will come up for you only once and looks like the image below.
As the semester ends and thoughts turn to summer research projects, now is a great time to close out your Blackboard course because on July 3, instructors’ students will be disappearing from Spring 2013 semester’s Blackboard courses. These courses have IDs that begin with 201220_. So if you are an instructor using Blackboard and haven’t gotten around to archiving your courses and you want to keep a record of your students’ grades and discussion board interactions, now is the time to archive your course, download your Grade Center as an Excel file, and/or collect your discussion board discussions.Other than student interactions and grades, all materials will remain in your course until you request its removal or three years has passed (whichever comes first). To download your grades, in Grade Center go to Workoffline > Download and save the full Grade Center. On the next screen, be sure to hit Download instead of OK.
If you are not familiar with Atomic Learning, it is the online video training services provider for the University of Richmond. There are hundreds of applications in their inventory, often spanning multiple versions of the application and for both Windows and Mac users. Applications include but are not limited to Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Acrobat, InDesign, etc.), Blackboard, iPod Touch, and Windows and Mac OS. Tutorials are broken up into short (1-4 minute long) video tutorials that you can watch using Flash or QuickTime formats. Users can pause, rewind, or navigate easily between video clips. You can access the system outside of Blackboard by going to http://is.richmond.edu/training/tutorials.html.