Blackboard Best Practices

Looking to streamline your course development? Want to make your Blackboard course more effective and efficient? Check out these 7 Best Practice Tips for Building a Blackboard Course. These tips deal with simplifying your navigation, progressive course building, touring your own course and much more.

Time to Drop the Digital Dropbox & Use Blackboard's Assignment Manager

The Assignment Manager allows instructors to create assignments and add them to a Content Area. They will have their name, point value, and a description. Instructors also have the option of including attachments to an assignment. Students complete the attachment in a separate file and send it back to the instructor via the assignment interface.

The following is a breakdown of the Assignment Manager versus the Digital Drop Box:

For more information on the Assignment Manager visit the Blackboard Software Guides.

Release Bb Content when you want with Adaptive Release

Even though it sounds like something from the Sports and Outdoors Network, Adaptive Release is your new best friend in Blackboard.

You can now provide content to your students based upon predetermined rules you set up. For example you can make a content area accessible within your course only if a student makes a certain grade range on an assignment or quiz. Other features that go hand in hand with Adaptive Release are Review Status and the Performance Dashboard.

Use the links for these great tools on the Blackboard Software Guides page to find out more.

Building your course? Are you using blocks?

Blackboard Fact: SHSU's Bb installation utilizes 11 Building Blocks that can make Blackboard more useful for you and your students. From Advanced Group Management to the Discussion Grader, Merlot and more.

Want more information? Check out the Blackboard Building Blocks section of the Blackboard Software Guides page.

Happy New Year!

Your Blackboard Team is looking forward to another great semester. As always we are here to help you. Is your department considering using a Publisher's cartridge for your Bb courses? Invite us to your meeting with the Publisher and we will be there to answer any questions that may arise.

If you have a Blackboard training need or Blackboard question, make sure to use Blackboard Central or the Blackboard Team email list, or give us a call at 294.HELP.

Have a great Spring 2006!

Bb Spring Cleaning?

A few things to help you get your Spring semester started.

Combo #5 - Be sure to let us know which sections and courses you would like combined for Spring.

Making Copies! - If you need to roll over any course information to the current semester, you have the power. Just use our course copying guides. ***Remember your Spring 2005 courses will disappear after the first week of the Spring 2006 semester .

Get Refreshed - Need to clean out the cobwebs of "Now how do I add that content item?" or interested in taking your course up a notch? Why not sign up for some one-on-one Blackboard Training.

Merlot and Blackboard - A Delicious Combination

Tired of scouring the web looking for articles, images and other course content enhancements? Why not add some Merlot to your course? Using the Merlot search engine allows you to add multiple links, audio and images to your course without having to do all of the legwork.

For instructions on how to add a bit of Merlot to your Blackboard course, just visit the Building Blocks section of the Blackboard Software Guides page.

Blackboard @ Sam Houston, A Community in Practice

Did you know that as of Spring of 2005, over 344 of your colleagues were using Blackboard?

Maybe someone out there has a great innovative technique with Discussion Boards or Quizzes, or there might be a professor out there who is really utilizing the Building Blocks to let students Build their own portfolio. Wouldn't it be great to find out?

Why not meet once a month with your colleagues in this community of practice? Let's share what we are doing and learn with each other our own Best Practices. Just reply to this e-mail with days or times during the week that are best for your schedule. The meetings will last no more than an hour. We can even meet during lunch time and bring a brown bag.