What is Blackboard?
Blackboard is one of the most useful technological resources currently available for educators and students. Through Blackboard information can be shared across colleges and departments, bringing all of the great minds at Lawrence Tech together in one interface.
Blackboard is a web-based teaching tool that Lawrence Tech implemented to support instruction. Blackboard is located at my.ltu.edu. The more familiar you become with Blackboard the more you realize how it will enhances and streamlines tasks for professional educators. The Veraldi Instructional Technology Resource Center is pleased to provide training and support documentation for this invaluable web based tool.
The Blackboard Learning System continues to provide exciting new enhancements. See the chart below for a listing of key features and links to training documents and simulations.
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Assessment Tools |
Communication Tools |
Assignments and Content Management |
 Grade Center |
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Assessment Tools |
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One of the premier enhancements is the Blackboard Grade Center(TM), a completely redesigned smart grading tool with an easy-to-use interface that simplifies the grading process while providing powerful analytic capabilities for instructors. |
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New Feedback option for essay questions. New Question types: Calculated Formula, Calculated Numeric, Hotspot, Jumbled Sentence, Likert Scale, True/False, Multiple Choice, Multiple Answer, Ordering, Matching, Fill-in-the-Blank, Short Answer, Essay, File Upload, and Binary Choice.
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Overview of the gradebook that stores and manages student performance results on assignment and assessments. The Performance Dashboard provides a view of student progress and indicates whether students have reviewed specific content items.
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Blackboard developed the Early Warning System, a tool that enables faculty to be alerted in a timely way to when students may be having academic difficulties. This capability enables faculty to quickly identify students who need more attention by defining rules against key performance metrics (Online Activity, Grades and/or Due Date) as well as encourages student engagement by making it easy for faculty to notify students and advisors about performance concerns via e-mail directly from the Early Warning System.
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Content items, discussions, assessments, assignments, or other activities can be released to students based on a set of criteria including: date/time, username, group membership, institution role, grade on a particular test or assignment, or whether the user has previously reviewed another piece of content.
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The Discussion Board enables threaded, asynchronous discussions. Instructors can set up multiple forums around different topics and embed those forums in appropriate content areas or lessons. Instructors can determine whether students can modify, delete, post anonymously, include attachments, and other options. Forums can be sorted/viewed by thread, author, date, or subject and are completely searchable. Back to Top |
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Better Text Editor Character Support - No more question marks (?) appearing when copying from a Word document to the Visual Text Box Editor!
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Scholar allows members of the Blackboard(R) community to save and classify bookmarks and searches, share resources with faculty, students and administrators from other institutions, automatically update courses with dynamic content feeds, and enable student contributions to course collections.
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Use the Announcements Feature to Communicate with Students. Create an Announcement within your Blackboard course using the new e-mail option.
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Assignments and Content Management |
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The Assignments feature enables instructors to create an assignment that automatically becomes an item in the Grade Center. Blackboard has enhanced the Assignment feature - enabling instructors to designate a "due date." Simulations are available below to show how to: Create an Assignment, Review a Completed Assignment and Submit a Grade within the Grade Center, Clear a Student's Assignment Attempt, and Using the File Cleanup Feature. Back to Top |
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SafeAssign is now native to Blackboard. Use this tool to ditect and teach about plagiarism. Back to Top |
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Addresses activities involving managing the course site or major components of the course site. Course Management capabilities focus on the Course Copy tool and for semester-to-semester migration and Course Import/Export for course backup.
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The Tasks page organizes projects or activities (referred to as tasks) by defining task priority and tracking task status. Instructors can post tasks to users participating in their courses. Task information is arranged in columns that display the priority, task name, status, and due date.
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The Visual Text Box, Spell Check, QuickEdit
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Glossary, the Electric Blackboard (an online note-taking tool students can use to take and save notes online as they work through their course materials), and Staff Information.
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If you would like more information about new features in Blackboard, or how to use them effectively in your class, please contact the Veraldi Instructional Resource Center at 248-204-3750 or vitrc@ltu.edu.