Calendar   |   Chat   |   Discussion Board   |   Drop Box   |   Glossary   |   Grade Book   |   Assessments

These are only some of the tools available to Blackboard users. The ones listed on this page are the most commonly used by RPI faculty. This is based on a user survey conducted in 2004 by Don Bell, then WebCT administrator. The survey can be found at http://www.rpi.edu/web/webct/admin/survey_summary.pdf.

Information about these tools and the rest of Blackboard's features can be found in the CE6 Manual - PDF

Calendar

The Calendar Tool provides a central location for you and your students to keep information that is both personal (e.g. reminders available only to the owner) and course-related (available only to those enrolled in the course as students or instructors).

Calendar entries may include links to course content or to external websites, notification of assignment due dates, changes to instructor office hours, or any other scheduling information you wish to record.

Some faculty also use the Calendar Tool as an organizer for their students’ personal journals (they are then asked to post every day) or team progress reports (students on a team then post a collective weekly report).

How to Click Sheet :
Student: Using the Calendar - PDF

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Chat

The Chat tool allows participants to meet virtually and establish synchronous communication outside of the classroom. Great for office hours, it can also be used to

• bring in guest speakers from anywhere in the world,
• collect additional rich, rapid feedback from students
• help some students overcome technophobia
• promote active learning.
• carry out formal or informal discussions about current events, controversies, readings, common experiments, business plans, and many other issues
• provide immediate feedback or responses to learner questions
• by students to present and describe their work to others; feedback or advice can be sought from other participants
• promote community among groups of learners who otherwise would be unable to communicate formally or informally (e.g., geographically dispersed)

The Chat Tool in Blackboard has three types of meeting rooms:

1. Four general purpose chat rooms that can be used for a wide variety of meetings, from group work to private extra help sessions. The conversations in the four general purpose rooms are automatically recorded in a text file that can be posted on the Blackboard site. This allows students who missed the meeting can to still have access to the information.
2. One general forum for the course.
3. One general Blackboard chat room for all courses. This is a room shared by everybody from all RPI courses that use Blackboard.

How to Click Sheet :
Student: Using the Chat - PDF

Useful Links
Tips and Tricks on Using Chat in WebCT
http://www.rpi.edu/web/webct/workshops/chat/using_chat.html

Chat Tool: Best Practices Tips & Tricks
http://teaching.unr.edu/OTL/webct/facres/chat/tips.html

Chat room
http://www.edtech.vt.edu/edtech/id/ocs/chat.html

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Discussion Board

The Discussion Tool, also known as the Discussion Board or Bulletin Board, is perhaps the most powerful tool in Blackboard. You can use this tool for a wide variety of purposes, ranging from graded activities, to short essays, to collaborative learning, to interactions with a visiting scholar.

The Discussion Tool helps create a sense of community in a course, a sharing among all of thoughts, ideas, and reflections on a shared experience. Students who use the discussion board often express the fact that they feel more connected to their classmates and instructor because of the in-depth and personal discussions that occur.

You can use the Discussion Tool to allow your students to read and reflect on the responses or work of others, which encourages deeper thinking, revisit the responses or work of others over a period of time, respond to others after reflective thinking time, have ongoing communication with others.

Some people can be intimidated by the idea of leaving their thoughts and feelings as text for everyone to read. It is important for the faculty to reassure their students and emphasize the fact that only you, the instructor and course participants will be able to view their postings. On the other hand, students who do not usually participate in face-to-face discussions feel more comfortable when they engage in online discussions.

The Discussion Tool on Blackboard can organized into different topic areas which allow you to create discussion forums around particular subjects. Topics can be public or private. Everyone in your course can access public topics, while private topics are available only to the set of students and teaching assistants that you choose.

How to Click Sheet :
Designer: Using the Discussion Board - PDF
Designer: Creating a Private Discussion Board - PDF
Student: Using the Discussion Board - PDF

Useful Links:
Using the Discussion Tool – Designer View
http://www.rpi.edu/web/webct/workshops/discuss/discuss.pdf

Creating Community: Asynchronous Online Discussion
http://distance.uaf.edu/lib/research/teaching-tips-05.pdf

Using EPost discussions in your course
http://catalyst.washington.edu/method/epost.html

Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever
http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/seven.html

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Drop Box

The Assignments Tool, or Drop Box, allows you to create and distribute course assignments to your students. It also allows you to collect these assignments electronically, download, evaluate, and assign a grade to the completed work.

There are several advantages to using this tool:

• It eliminates a lot of paper shuffling,
• It provides one central online location for all assignment listing, submission, grading and feedback.
• It allows you to electronically deliver grades and comments
• It provides your students with rich, rapid feedback on their assignments
• It allows them to retrieve their assignment grade and comments from any computer that has internet access.
• It generates a column in the Manage Students gradebook and stores the grades there
• It allows you to download individual or multiple student assignment submissions
• It allows you to attach assignment-related files such as photographs, a spreadsheet you might want the student to modify, or articles to which you want students to respond.
• It allows your students to view the assignment instructions, submit their completed work, and view their grade after you have graded their assignment.

In summary, the Drop Box tool enables you to create and distribute course assignments and provide your students with a controlled online environment where they can submit their assignments and receive grades and instructor feedback. The assignments can have a due date, a cut-off date ; they can be listed on students 'my Blackboard' page as a constant reminder that an assignment is due.

How to Click Sheet :
Creating an Assignment - PDF
Using the Assignments Tool - PDF

 

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Glossary

Glossaries can be a valuable source of terminology: A large number of glossaries available on the internet contain terms that cannot be found in any paper dictionary, either because publication via the internet is that much faster than the traditional dictionary printing process - and thus better capable of keeping abreast with technology and neologisms - or because the terminology is company specific and would not normally be printed for the general public.

Use the Glossary Tool to create a fully-searchable glossary for your course. It can contain images as well as text, so that illustrative glossary definitions are possible.

How to Click Sheet :
Comming Soon!

Useful Links:

WebCT Glossary
http://www.csub.edu/webct/for_faculty/Using_WebCT_Tools.shtml#glossary

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Grade Book

The Blackboard Gradebook is a practical and efficient tool for managing your student grades. The benefits for using the Gradebook are twofold:

For the instructor:

• The grades for quizzes and assignments submitted though Blackboard are automatically entered
• You can record grades numerically or by letter grade
• Final grades can be quickly calculated.
• The Blackboard Gradebook is compatible with Excel
• You can import existing grades and backup your current Blackboard Gradebook.

Note: Given the online nature of Blackboard, we recommend that you keep an offline copy in Excel. In doing so, you can avoid any inconveniences that may occur if you cannot access the internet.

For the students:

• They have quick access to their all their grades.
• They can follow their progress in the course
• They only see their grades, but if the instructor releases the class statistics, they can also see how are performing in relation to the rest of the class.

How to Click Sheet :
Adding a Column - PDF

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Assessments

Use the Assessments tool to create and administer quizzes and surveys.

In Blackboard, Quizzes are tests for which grades are assigned. Grades and statistics can be released to both you and your students. Depending upon the type of questions in a quiz, quizzes can be completely or partially graded by Blackboard, marked by an assigned teaching assistant, or by yourself.

Surveys, on the other hand, are anonymous tests for which no grades are assigned, but which provide you with statistics. Survey responses are automatically tabulated, and the results are summarized. Because the results are anonymous, surveys are ideal for course evaluations or for canvassing opinions on an issue discussed in the course.

The Assessments tool is actually a very powerful, fully featured assessment database! It supports five questions types; a whole range of quiz and question release options; various access security mechanisms; auto-marking; auto feeding of grade data to the underlying database, and to the gradebook, and lots more.

The Assessments tool is one of the more complex of the Blackboard tools. Adding a new quiz or survey is basically a two-part process. First you create questions and add them to the question database, and next you choose the questions you want to include on your quiz or survey. To help with organization, you may choose to create different categories for the questions although this is not required. There are five different types of questions you can use: multiple-choice, matching , calculated, short answer, or paragraph. All questions except the paragraph type are automatically graded by Blackboard. The course instructor or a teaching assistant must mark paragraph questions manually.

How to Click Sheet :
Creating a Quiz - PDF
Taking a Quiz - PDF

Useful Links:
WebCT and Online Assessment:  The best thing since SOAP?
http://www.ifets.info/journals/6_2/7.html

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