Review Status

Enabling review status allows students to indicate whether they have reviewed an item or not. Instructors can add review status to assignments, quizzes, items and links posted to Blackboard. To add review status to an item, make sure the edit button is on, and hover over the assignment title. Click on the pull down and select Set Review Status. Select Enable, and review status is now set. Students will see a button next to the assignment that they will be able to click to indicate they've reviewed the assignment. To see which students have reviewed, go to Evaluation in the Control Panel, and select Performance Dashboard. You can click the numbers under Review Status to see if the items have been reviewed or not by each student.

Next video will go into connecting Adaptive Release assignments with the Review Status button.

Adding a grade center column on BB

It’s about the time in the semester when major assignments start to come in. It’s easy to keep track of student grades on Blackboard. This tutorial will show you how to manually add a column in the grade center, and briefly discuss the types of assignments that are automatically added.

To start, click on the grade center link in the control panel and select full grade center. Choose create column, and then add a name, description if desired, primary or secondary display, point value, rubric, due date, and options. Hit submit, and you should now see the column in your grade center display. You can also experiment with creating calculated columns, which are useful if you use weights in your course.

If you choose to have students submit assignments via blackboard drop boxes, those will be automatically populated to the grade book. You can also set other tools to automatically add, such as journals, discussion boards, and exams.

Adding a rubric to a Turnitin assignment

Some of my faculty use Turnitin for plagiarism detection, but the bonus is that it can also be used for grading! It's super simple to add a rubric to a Turnitin assignment.

Here is the explanation from Turnitin: http://turnitin.com/en_us/training/instructor-training/using-rubrics-for-grading-and-evaluating

And here are some sample/usable rubrics: http://turnitin.com/en_us/resources/teaching-tools/rubrics

Changing the landing page on Blackboard 9.1

If you don’t use the home page function, you can easily change the course entry point to another page that is used more in your course. Some instructors choose to use Announcements as the landing page. To change your course entry point, click Customization in the control panel and select Teaching Style. Select Course Entry Point is the second option on the page. Click the drop down, and choose the page you want to show as the starting page for your course. Scroll down to the bottom to hit submit, and now your students will see your chosen page when they log in.

Welcome

Welcome to Tracy's Tech Tips.

I work as an instructional designer at Fresno State. Part of my job is to create quick tips for faculty/staff/students to help develop/facilitate courses/training modules. Many of the tips I will post will be for use in Blackboard 9.1, since that is the LMS we use.

Check back regularly for new tips and tricks for course design!

Tracy