Category Archives: Blackboard

Is your course list too cluttered?

Posted on January 11, 2011 | Comments Off on Is your course list too cluttered?

I am often amazed when I work with instructors and see them scrolling through looooooong course lists in My Blackboard. The course list is the center column in My Blackboard that lists all of the courses you are teaching, as well as those you have taught. If you have been at Concordia for a while (and many of you have), this list can be huge! If you are not familiar with how to hide old courses, take a few minutes and watch the following brief tutorial. I also talk about the icons that show up in the course list.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HooOhxTZ3lE

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Posted in Blackboard, Online Teaching

Are Your Students Internet Detectives?

Posted on December 22, 2010 | Comments Off on Are Your Students Internet Detectives?

There is no question that, in general, today’s student would rather use the Internet for research than go to the library. However, are they prepared to effectively navigate the Internet for academic information? In many cases, the answer is no. Can they find their favorite artist on iTunes? Sure. Can they locate a friend on Facebook? Absolutely.  Nevertheless, online academic research is a different animal altogether, and something that is not necessarily intuitive.  More importantly, instructors often neglect making it a learning objective.

Enter Internet Detective…

Internet Detective is a free online tutorial that will introduce your students to the ins and outs of online research.  Examples of topics include evaluating websites, plagiarism, and copyright.  Sure, you could simply direct students to the site, but I have some even better news.  You can import the Internet Detective learning modules into your Blackboard WebCt course.

It gets even better…

How can you hold students accountable for working through the tutorial? How about assigning a graded quiz? Internet Detective also allows you to import quizzes into your Blackboard WebCT course. Once imported, the quizzes are ready to go, gradebook column and all. Why not make this an assignment the first week of class?

Watch this tutorial to learn more about importing Internet Detective learning modules and quizzes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbGI2ig38MQ

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Posted in Blackboard, Digital Citizenship

Forwarding Blackboard Emails

Posted on December 17, 2010 | Comments Off on Forwarding Blackboard Emails

I receive a lot of questions about whether or not emails sent via Blackboard can be forwarded to preferred email addresses.  At one point, we were unable to do this due to a glitch in the system.  Thankfully, Kent Einspahr has fixed that glitch and we can now forward emails!  Here are Kent’s instructions:

  • In order for forwarding to work, the designer must enable email forwarding for the course section. To do that, in the ‘Build’ tab, go to Manage course->Settings->Mail (under the Tools column) and set “Allow messages to be forwarded to an external e-mail address” to true and save the values.
  • A person who wants to have their Bb email forwarded to an external address must also go to “My Settings” at the top of the “My Blackboard” page and 1) make sure the email address in the “My Profile” tab is set to the correct forwarding address and 2) click on the “Forward all mail messages to the e-mail address in my profile” under the “My Tool Options” tab.
  • The from address in the forwarded message will come from “DoNotReply!cune.edu” since Blackboard will forward the mail from a generic email address that doesn’t make sense to reply to and because mail cannot be sent from an external e-mail address back into Blackboard.

Please note the third bullet.  Students will not be able to reply to the forwarded email.  They will need to create a new email from their preferred account, or go to Blackboard and email from there.  However, this solution will hopefully alleviate situations where students are not seeing emails that you send.

Please feel free to ask questions or comment on this post by clicking “Leave a Comment” above the post.

 

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Posted in Blackboard