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

About wikis


Blackboard enables your students to collaborate on a wiki. A wiki is usually a group writing project. While it is rare, you can create a separate wiki for each student. More commonly, you can separate students into groups, and then have a wiki for each group. So each wiki that you create can be for the entire class, for a group within the class, or for an individual.

In this section, we'll see how to create a wiki for the class. Groups are covered in Chapter 8, Working with Groups. After you know how to create and manage a class wiki, you will have the background needed to work with group wikis.

Just like every course has a Blogs page that lists all of the blogs in the course, and a Course Discussion page that lists all of the forums in the course, every course has a Wikis page that lists all of the wikis in the course. When you first create a course, a wiki might already be created for you. It depends upon how your administrator has set up the new course template.

Creating a...