Blackboard improvements within Grade Center
GRADE CENTER
Mark-Up Tools
Let’s begin with the Grade Center. The mark-up tools you use to provide feedback in the Grade Center are, in my opinion, massively improved due to pen options, highlighting and search commands at your fingertips.
Inline Grading
The changes to the grading inline view have changed. If you recall we took a step sideways in the embedded grading tool when Blackboard replaced Crocodoc with the New Box View.
You can write on the document, add comments, print it, search the text, and search your content library while in the grading view.
Searching: you will see the number of times your search term is found in the PDF. You can navigate to the next or previous one with arrows. The word is highlighted.
When you highlight an area of a student’s PDF submission you have five options:
- Highlight
- Strike-through
- Underline
- Squiggly underline
- Make a comment
Your selection is one color (in the case below it is shown in blue highlighting) until you make your choice of how to mark it up.
In the mark-up area you have transparency controls to your pen, marker and lines.
Reminders
For those of you who are teaching quite a few students, consider a quick tool inside of the Full Grade Center view that allows you to quickly and easily send a reminder to all of the students who have not submitted an assignment.
Click on the menu for the assignment you’d like to send a reminder about and choose “Send Reminder.”
Blackboard will send an email from you with the following:
“You currently don’t have a grade or submission for the following coursework: Title: Assignment Title: Your full Course ID and Name, Due Date: the due date you already assigned Please log in to review the instructions for this coursework and check the calendar for all due dates.”
Real example: “You currently don’t have a grade or submission for the following coursework: Title: Introductions Course: CS F101 UX1 202101 (CRN 34447) Computers and Society Course ID: CS_F101_34447_202101 Due date: Jan 16, 2021 Please log in to review the instructions for this coursework and check the calendar for all due dates.”
MORE INFO ABOUT BLACKBOARD UPDATES
- The YouTube error being seen on or before January 13 was related to an internal query limit. OIT indicated they were going to up the limit. Please, if you are still having trouble add YouTube videos inside of Blackboard, let OIT know. Instructional designers have tested and been able to add YouTube videos in a few different ways.
- Embedding videos and documents. In case you’d like to be shown how or walked through a few of these changes, here are a few links to updated documents related to our discussion:
– How to Add Video Presentations to Blackboard with Personal Capture (Kaltura)
– How to Embed iframe code in Blackboard
I am frustrated that inline comments require the student to hover and read. This is cumbersome. Is there not a method of downloading assignments and comments that would be more efficient for the student? I used this option in another software-based system to review all of my graduate assignments.
I know you can download materials for grading by choosing that from a Grade Center column. I am not aware of an option for the student to download her work.