End of the Year Info

Data collection and course backups

Instructors, please remember that as soon as students have graduated, their information (including gradebook entries and quiz/survey responses) will be unavailable to you. You will need to download the results of surveys or quiz results that you are using for research before the 27th of December to make sure that you have all of the data for all of your students this semester. It is also a good idea to make a backup of your course for your records before graduated students drop out.

BLACKBOARD DOWNTIME

Your My.UNL team will be upgrading the Blackboard software to version 8 over the Holiday Closedown in December. My.UNL.EDU will be offline from December 27, 2008 through January 3, 2009.

The latest Blackboard release builds on the student engagement tools in earlier releases, and improves the performance of the software. Most noticeably, the Gradebook has been transformed into the Grade Center. Instructors will be able to enter scores more efficiently, select specific display types, freeze names for easier scrolling, and drop lowest/highest scores. The new Grade Center will also allow faculty to print progress reports and access powerful analysis tools. Please go to http://training.unl.edu and look in the What's New area for more information and training opportunities.

Another change in version 8, is the absence of the Digital Drop Box. The Blackboard Assignment Manager tool is an improvement on the Drop Box. Faculty post student assignments, and students upload their completed assignment directly back into Blackboard. There you can download their work, provide feedback, grade the assignment, and post grades to the Grade Center with a few mouse clicks. To learn more about the Assignment Manager, go to http://itg.unl.edu/myunl/index.shtml, click on the Faculty/TA tab, and look for the Using Assignments tutorial under Blackboard Assessments.

If you have any questions,please contact the Help Desk at 472-3970 (outside of Lincoln, toll free at 866-472-3970), or via email at helpdesk@unl.edu

ATTENTION ALL SafeAssign USERS!

Your My.UNL team updated our SafeAssign software over Fall Break. The new version of SafeAssign will now accept .docx files. With the progress comes two issues that are important:

#1. All faculty who are using SafeAssign, in their classes must use the SafeAssign tool to resynchronize their class. To do this, you will need to go to each course, then click on the Control Panel, then Click on SafeAssign, and then click on the link that says "Synchronize this Course". The synchronization process may take a while.

#2. All SafeAssign users (faculty and students) must set their browsers to accept cookies from the SafeAssign website. If you do not, you will receive an error when trying to use SafeAssign. Instructions for doing this can be found here: SafeAssign Cookies.

If you have any questions, please contact the Computer Help Center at 472-3970 (or, if you're outside of Lincoln, toll free at 866-472-3970) or via email at helpdesk@unl.edu.

SLATE Presentation

Speed up your Blackboard Communication

Did you know that when you post an announcement to your Blackboard class, you can automatically email the announcement to the entire class roster? Just go to Control Panel> Announcements, then when you add your announcement, click the button to automatically Email the announcement to all course users. Blackboard does all the work for you. This is a great way to email students, and create a record of your communication in your course. If your students do not check their email very often, they will still see the information when they log in to your class.

Safe Assign Unavailable

Please note that Blackboard SafeAssignTM will be unavailable while undergoing maintenance on Saturday, September 27. This maintenance window is part of an update which will include the following improvements:

* Support for Microsoft Office 2007 (.docx) and OpenOffice (.odt) word processing documents
* Support for use of SafeAssign in Blackboard Community SystemTM Organizations
* Stability enhancements
* Bug fixes

The system is expected to be intermittently unavailable from the morning through evening (EDT) on September 27.

Work around for Firefox 3 and Blackboard Issue

Thanks to Sydney Brown for finding and testing the work around. It works!

Work around for Firefox 3 and Blackboard Issue

Thanks to Sydney Brown for finding and testing the work around. It works!

Teaching/Blackboard Resources

Here is some good information on Blogs and Wikis in Blackboard. Click the links to download PDF start-up files.

Here is some Podcasting Information:

More information on podcasting, pedagogy, you-tube, and instructional design.
http://blog.podagogy.com/

We can learn from Starbucks!
http://podonomics.com/why-starbucks-coffee-conversations-podcast-failed/

The Education Podcast Network (EPN)
http://pedagogy.cwrl.utexas.edu/?q=node/84

Are you having problems adding comments to your Gradebook?

Clicking Modify Comments from the Modify Grade page results in an error "Attempt must be submitted before adding comments." Comments must be entered from the Item Grade List.

Click on the name/title of the assignment/column. Then click Modify Grade List. From there you can add comments for individual students.

Summer and Fall '08 Courses

Your Summer and Fall 2008 courses will be available on Blackboard in mid to late March. All course shells are controlled by data that we receive from Records and Registration. Blackboard does not receive this data until registration for these semesters is officially open.

We will be putting out a notice when these courses are available.

Blogs and Wikis

Check out the new Blog and Wiki tools in Blackboard. Do you want to have your students keep a private, electronic journal that is easy to grade? Or, provide a collaborative work place for your student groups to work on a project? Then check out the Blog and Wiki tools. You can access face-to-face and online training on both tools at http://training.unl.edu.

Try the MyStuff Tab!

The My.UNL now has important information and modules required by our system. You now have a MyStuff tab that can be used to add modules that you find useful. The MyStuff tab is your place to personalize your Blackboard space.