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

Summary


In this example, we had a student download a file, work with it, and then upload the file into an assignment. But remember that assignments don't need to be done online. An assignment can also be done in the real, physical world. For example, you could instruct your students to build something and then bring it to class. Or, you could instruct them to make a video and upload it to another site, or contribute to www.wikipedia.org. The student doesn't need to upload anything for you to be able to grade the assignment because Blackboard's Grade Center enables you to give a grade to any assignment at any time. So whenever you need to instruct your students to perform some kind of independent action, consider using an assignment.

In the next chapter, we'll learn how to build and use tests.