The Blackboard Grade Center offers options for reviewing student performance on your tests and exams and can be a useful mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of your test questions. A poorly worded question doesn’t mean your students aren’t mastering the content. Look for Attempts Statistics, Download Results, Item Analysis and Column Statistics as options in the column header for your test.
If you’re a longtime Windows user, you might be wishing for a visual folder structure view of your course. You may be more familiar with a “tree' structure where you see folders with a “+' sign indicating something in the folder. When you click on the folder icon that is right above the course name, a new window will open that allows you to navigate quickly to a nested tree structure where titles are links. This option is also available for students.
The Blackboard Learn application for iOS has been available for quite a while. The application is very student friendly and is a great option for accessing course material and posting to the discussion board using a mobile device. The Blackboard Grader application is now available (iOS iPad only) and should prove to be a great advantage for instructors.
Having an institutional Learning Management System (LMS) has both advantages and disadvantages. Some of the advantages are that class and student data is automatically created based on the institution’s registration system, students gain familiarity with the LMS’ structure and navigation, there is an online gradebook for teachers and students, and more.
Many instructors spent frenzied final hours before launch wrestling content into Blackboard. One frequent source of challenge is that nearly all of us develop our lectures, notes and syllabi in Microsoft Word and when we transfer these materials online, we unwittingly wander into a decades old battleground. We innocently expect that we should be able to copy and paste from our Word document directly into Blackboard. But the potential layers of complexity and conflict can be more than frustrating.
Are you teaching or are you enrolled in a UAF CTL-supported course? If so, you may have recently noticed a new feature in Blackboard we call the ‘UAF CTL Tab’. If you haven’t checked it out, next time you log into Blackboard, look next to the ‘My Blackboard’ tab at the top right and click on ‘UAF CTL’. You will find three sections there with lots of important and helpful information including links to social media on each page.
Whether you use a Weighted Total column and/or the Total column, take a look at how the use of the Running Total option affects your students’ perception of their grade.
To experiment without adjusting an actual student’s grade record, click on the “Go To Student View' button located in the upper right corner under the tabs that say “My Blackboard' and “Courses.'
The end of the semester is a good time to review how well your students did on your class assessments and if those assessments actually gave you evidence of student’s understanding. One type of assessment that you might include in your course is a test that students access through Blackboard.
Get an overview of your activity within the Blackboard world all in one spot by using the new Global Navigation feature in the update, Service Pack 11, for Blackboard 9.1. This efficient suite of tools will help you and your students get an overview of your activity within the Blackboard world —all in one spot.
