mymcc Community

It has come to our attention that Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and Blackboard are having compatibility issues causing an error with uploading documents.  We have found  a workaround to solve this problem.  It will require you to install a Firefox add-on, User Agent Switcher 0.6.11.:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59. 

Once you have the add-on installed, go ahead and take a look in your Tools menu. You will see a new entry, "User Agent Switcher." Select Tools->User Agent Switcher->Options->Options... Now choose User Agents then Add.

Make the description "Blackboard" and the user agent "mac."

Nancy & Sanford

Hello,
As you prepare your courses to start a new semester whether your starting something new or preparing a course that you have done many times before.  If you have set up Blackboard assignments in your course that you want to remove please work on the assignment itself first.  If you remove the entry from the gradebook first this will in essence orphan the Assignment in the content area making it impossible to remove without many a headache.

NANC

Over the past several months I have had people get in touch with me regarding editing within Blackboad.  The issue is that the right hand margin of the material has expanded so far over that there is a lot of horizontal scrolling going on to edit the material.

Initially the thought was that the issue was caused by copying from Word into items and folders.  This can be the case as MS Word makes some pretty evil looking HTML.  However it is not always the case.  I will not go into all the particulars here just know that this may be an issue.

I asked Blackboard to look into this for us. There answers needless to say were less than satisfactory and they have asked us to put in a request for a product improvement.  The one solution that seems to be currently viable is to save things as plain text, bring it into Blackboard that way and put the formatting in with the Blackboard editor.

Nancy

I never hesitate to say that the gradebook in Blackboard is not my favorite thing to deal with.  The way the gradebook functions will change in a future version of Blackboard.  There is a small thing that I get phone calls and emails on fairly regularly and that is the Weighted Total column "I've weighted the categories but still have students with total average grades like 64% who have assignment grades of 100, 100, 100, 94."  Well this comes into play when you have weighted things by category.  In order for the weight to look right click the title "Weighted Total" at the top of the column in the gradebook>  select "Modify Gradebook Item">  it will then give you the opportunity to exempt things from that total that have not been graded.  This will make the weight correct as you go through the semester grading items.

Nancy

As you are already aware there are significant changes to the Discussion Board since our transition to BB 7.3 and beyond.  Let's talk about the particulars.

First and most important you may now set discussion forums to be unavailable to the students until they are needed.  Setting the availability also lets you set a date span for particular discussion boards.  Just be aware that you will still be able to see all forums even if you have made them unavailable to students.  There is a notation below the forums description "This forum is currently unavailable" to let you know which ones the students can and can not see.

The settings for the forums have changed considerably; some of the old setting remain, some new ones have been added and there are still others that have been removed.  The old settings that remain unchanged are:

• Allow anonymous posts
• Allow users to modify own posts
• Allow for file attachments
• Allow for the creation of new threads

Allowing for users to remove their own posts was I believe a setting in the last version of BB.  It has however been modified a little more.  You can now allow for user to either remove all of their posts or to remove only the ones no one responded to. 

Some of the new features are totally new and others are old features revamped to function in a different manner.  The first of these is post tagging. Having not quite figured out why this is there I am going to make some assumptions according to what I know.  Tagging would allow for the application of something similar to a subject line to an entry and because the DB now has a search feature these tags would allow for more detailed searches.

Allowing users to reply with quotes will include the body of the message the are replying to with their response.  This may be helpful for the students when replying to a classmates posting. 

One of the most interesting new aspects of the discussion is the ability to subscribe to several aspects of the discussion.  You can opt not to allow for subscriptions at all.  Users can be allowed to subscibe to either the thread or to the entire forum.  A subscription to a thread or a forum will send an email to the users address when new materials have been posted. 

Rating user posts will perhaps be of assistance if you are interested in doing peer review of any kind.  If you are dealing with writing you would be able to post drafts and various iterations of writing assignments so that students will be able rate and give feedback to each other.

Force Moderation will allow you to review discussion postings before they are published to the entire class.  This may be viewed as more work as each posting must be reviewed before it can be viewed by the class.  This is considered a safety feature more than anything.

You may also flag posts to the discussion similar to the manner that you would flag emails to mark them for follow up.

There are several other smaller things that have changed but I would encourage you to explore a little. 

Nancy

It seems there is some confusion on EVERYONES part on how to use the discussion board.  There were some questions regarding collect postings and Marking As Read.  When you collect posts there are a couple of ways to mark things read.  Each message that you collect has a "Mark As Read" button in the bottom right corner of the message.  You may also mark selected messages as read by checking the box at the right side of the message (near the heading) and then click the "Mark as Read" button at the top of the forum.

There also seems to be some confusion about students being able to see their discussion posts.  There are two possible reasons why a student may not be able to see their discussion posts.  First they need to understand the difference between Save and Submit.  Save will basically allow them to set up a draft of their message; however it will not be public for you or their classmates unitl they click Submit which will make it public to the class.  The other possible reason for not seeing their own messages is that they have not posted an original post but instead they have replied to one of their classmates.  This replying to other classmates causes the message to be wrapped up in the thread and unless the thread is fully expanded the message they posted may not be immediatley visible to them.  The threads can be expanded by clicking the plus sign that may be residing to the left of the message header.

One of the things that I would emphasize with your students is that when they are posting their original messages that they should use the +Thread button (add new thread). 

Nancy

As an addendum to the previous post it has come to my attention that Safe Assign does not support Office 2007 documents.  You should inform your students to save their work in a previous version of Word.

Nancy