I received an email from an instructor that said her students could not see the Content Areas of her course in Blackboard. With a little poking and prodding, it turns out that the menu for the Blackboard course had the Content Areas unavailable. Here’s a brief tutorial on how to make those items available (or unavailable) to students or participants.

1.Go into the Control Panel

2. Under Course Options, click on Manage Course Menu.

3. Under the items that are not available, click on the Modify button across from them.

4. Under Step 1, check the check box next to Available for Student/Participant users.

5. Click Submit.

-Angel Brady

This is a brief walk through of the process of creating a test from Pool Manager questions.

1. Click on Control Panel
2. Click on Test Manager
3. Create a new test (or click the Modify Button across from the test you want to add poll questions to)
4. Under the Page title Test Canvas, you will see a Drop down menu next to the work Add, click on the drop down
5. Scroll towards the bottom and choose From a Question Pool or Assessment.
6. Click the Go button next to the drop down menu
7. Choose the pool you want to use for your questions in your test
8. Check the check box(es) next to the question type you want to bring into your Blackboard test. If you want all of then check the check box next to All.
9. Choose if you want to assign values to each question (you can edit this later in the test).
10. Click search
11. Check the check box next to the questions you want to bring in. Click on Preview to view the entire question and answer.
12. Click Submit

-Angel Brady

This screencast demonstrates how to manually grade an item in Blackboard’s Gradebook, how to override a manual grade in Gradebook, and how to clear attempts on an item. With some items, you need to enter a manual grade (for an essay for example). The Override manual grade feature can be for a student that did extra credit to boost their grade, you can enter their new grade and override the old one (while keeping the old one in their for reference). You can also allow a student to re-take an online exam/quiz by clearing the attempt of the exam and clearing the grade in Gradebook. To view this screencast, click on the following link:

 Entering Manual Grades in Blackboard 7

-Angel Brady

This screencast demonstrates how to flag a post in a discussion board thread in Blackboard 7. This is a great feature in case you need to go back to a posts to re-read it later. It is also ideal for grading purposes. To view the screencast, click on the following link:
How to Flag Discussion Board Posts in Blackboard 7

-Angel Brady

This screencast will demonstrate how to use ustream.tv (free service) to live video stream lectures or office hours to your students and embed it into Blackboard. This is a great tool for distance learning and for instructors that can not make ito to campus due to bad weather or other circumstances but still want to cover material in their course. All you need is a web cam (a cheep one will do), a computer, and an internet connection. To view the screencast click on the following link:

How to Use ustream.tv to Stream Live Video to Your Students in Blackboard

-Angel Brady

I recently wanted to batch upload 38 users into a Blackboard organization. So I opened TextEdit in Mac OSX, filled in the proper information : “org ID”,”user ID”,”Role-S,P”. Every time I uploaded the text file, received an error. I tried to save it out as different formats (like ASCII), but still got the same errors (I think Blackboard did not recognize the hard returns in the text file). I tried to create the same text file in Notepad in Windows and I did not receive any errors. But I wanted to do this in Mac OS X. What program can I use in OS X to achieve this same success I had in Windows?

I decided to look for another text editor to create this file. I found TextWranger: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml. I created the same text file in TextWranger. Now I will give a step by step on how I saved the file:

1. Type in the info for the Batch Enroll file:

“org ID”,”user ID1″,”Role-S,P” *hard return
“org ID”,”user ID2″,”Role-S,P” *hard return*

2. Go to File—-> Save As

3. Click on the Options button

4. For Line Breaks, choose DOS

5. Click OK

6. Choose a place to save it and click Save.

Load this file into Blackboard and you will not receive errors when enrolling the users. Enjoy!

To view the screencast, click on the link below:
Batch Enroll Users In Blackboard 7 Using TextWrangler for Mac OS

-Angel Brady

This is a screencast demonstrates how to create a form in Google Docs and how to embed it into a webpage using iframe tags. To view the screencast, click on the following link:

 Create Google Forms and Embed into Your Webpage

-Angel Brady

This screencast will show you how to can share the slideshow you created in Google Docs and Spreadsheets with your students in your Blackboard course. This is a great way to go green with your course because the students will be viewing the slideshow on screen, not on paper. Students can choose if they want to print the slides as well. The other big bonus is that you are not uploading a huge PowerPoint file to the course (remember, we have a quota on how much content can be in a course). To view the screencast, click on the following link:

 How to Link Your Google Docs Slideshow in Blackboard 7

-Angel Brady

This screencast will demonstrate how to send email to your class through Blackboard. To view this screencast, click on the following link:

 How to Send Email Through Blackboard 7

-Angel Brady

In this screencast, we go over how to view and modify grades in the gradebook. We also briefly touch upon how students view their grades that are posted in Blackboard as well. To view this screencast, click on the following link:

 Viewing and Modifying Grades in the Gradebook in Blackboard 7

-Angel Brady