Book Image

Blackboard Essentials for Teachers

By : William Rice
Book Image

Blackboard Essentials for Teachers

By: William Rice

Overview of this book

Blackboard is the world's most popular commercial learning management system. With Blackboard you can construct and deliver professional quality elearning courses with ease. Its many features, which allow you to manage courses, grading and assessments, and social collaboration, are the standard against which other learning management systems are measured. Blackboard Essentials for Teachers shows you how to use Blackboard's most essential features by guiding you through the development of a demonstration course, built on Blackboard's free site for teachers, coursesites.com. You will also learn more about Blackboard's most important features, such as the gradebook, using clear instructions to guide you every step of the way. By following an example course, this book will guide you, step-by-step, through creating your own Blackboard course. Start by adding static material for students to view, such as pages, links, and media. Then, add interaction to your courses, with discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Most importantly, engage your students in your course by communicating with them, assessing them, and putting them into groups. Blackboard Essentials for Teachers will enable you to take your elearning course from inception, to construction, to delivery.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Blackboard Essentials for Teachers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Managing a forum


Now that you have created a forum and your students are posting in it, you can start managing the forum. Blackboard offers several features for this.

Collecting posts in a forum

Blackboard enables you to select individual posts in a forum, and then display just the selected posts on a single page. Let's look at a simple example.

In this forum, the instructor started a thread with a post called Where did you waste water today? Then, two students responded as shown in the following screenshot:

Suppose that we want to see the students' posts collected on one page. First, we select these posts by clicking on the checkbox next to them:

Then, we click on the Collect button. The result is a page containing only the selected posts; this page shows not only the subject, but also the content of the posts:

In the upper-right corner of the page, is the Filter button. When you click on the Filter button, you can search for posts by several criteria:

Once you have collected and filtered...