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Published on Leave a comment on Bb Tip #154: Bb Grader

Hand holding iPad mini with Bb Grader app screen showing on the screen

The Bb Grader app provides instructors with a mobile solution to grade Blackboard assignments. With Bb Grader, instructors can use their iPads to review, provide feedback, and ultimately grade submitted assignments from within the app. Instructors can view a detailed list of all assignment submissions and can sort submissions based on a category of information.

Key features in the Bb Grader app:

  • Inline viewing of student submissions for PDF, Word, Powerpoint, PNG, and JPEG files
  • Gesture-based interactions for grading and feedback
  • Support for audio and video-based feedback
  • Course and assignment level views
  • Integration with multiple attempts, group assignments, rubrics, and anonymous grading

Note: For unsupported file types, instructors may download the file, view the file on their device (if supported by the device), and still provide grade information via the Bb Grader app.

The Bb Grader app is not intended to replace all grading workflows within Blackboard; rather, it’s meant to complement it with the enhancement of key features that translate best to a mobile device.

Bb Grader requires iOS 7 + and is compatible with iPad Air, iPad mini, and iPad 2, 3, or 4.

Want more information?

Bb Grader App
See Bb Grader in action (video [2:42])
Bb Grader Features Guide (PDF)
Download Bb Grader app
Explore Blackboard’s On Demand Learning Center.
Check out help for instructors at help.blackboard.com.
Try these Blackboard How-To documents.
Visit the Blackboard FAQs for additional blackboard information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Published on Leave a comment on Bb Tip #153: Simplify Assignment Collection

Use the Assignment Tool to help you set and manage deadlines, unclutter your inbox, and save trees.

email inbox showing there are 99999 unread messages

The Assignment Tool is an efficient way to manage and collect your student's individual and group assignments digitally. Blackboard's Assignment Tool allows instructors to create a secure location for students to submit class assignments.

Instructors use the Grade Center to monitor the submission process, to view and/or download submitted work, to compose and send confidential feedback to students and to grade the assignment. Instructors can download all of a particular assignment’s student submitted files in a single zip file. In the download zip file, each student submitted file will be renamed automatically to include the assignment’s name, the student’s username, as well as the filename the student originally submitted.

A number of options are available when creating an assignment using the Assignment Tool:

  • Assignment Files - allows instructors to attach supplemental information
  • Assignment Availability - allows instructors to create assignments in advance
  • Assignment Submissions (attempts) – allows for multiple or unlimited submissions
  • Date and Time Restrictions - allows instructors to decide when students can access the assignment
  • Individual or Group Assignments – allows instructors to choose who has access to assignment
  • Tracking Statistics - track the number of views and by whom

Want more information?

Getting Started with Assignments (PDF)
Working with Assignments
How to submit assignments (video [2:28])
Explore Blackboard’s On Demand Learning Center.
Check out help for instructors at help.blackboard.com.
Try these Blackboard How-To documents.
Visit the Blackboard FAQs for additional blackboard information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Published on Leave a comment on Technology to Help Students Find Their Voice

by Janice Florent

birdhouse with you are your voice etched on it

It’s important for students to find their voice in eLearning. Students need the ability to recognize their own beliefs, practice articulating them in a variety of forms, and then find the confidence and the platform to express them.

There is no one-size-fits-all technology solution for students to express themselves and interact with the world. In a Edutopia blog post, Terry Heick writes,

You can indeed insist that all students blog because, from your perspective, it sounds justifiable and beneficial, but if the goal is to help students find their own voice, they will need choices.

Terry goes on to suggest some possible web tools that would allow students to find their voice. Those web tools are:

Word Press or Blogger – These tools can help students establish their own digital space to meet the world.

Storify or Storehouse – These tools allow you to collect media bits and pieces from across the web, and to socialize them (that is, to shape them into a unique form of expression through social media.)

Podcasting or VoiceThread – These tools allow students to express themselves verbally around an idea important to them.

YouTube Channels - Students can create review channels, perform music, humorously remix existing content, act, create documentaries, and an unlimited number of other possibilities.

For more information, you can read Terry’s blog post 4 Technologies to Help Students Find Their Voice in Your Classroom.

Also, check out Bart Everson’s blog post 50 Web Tools for other web tools that may be used to help students find their voice and my Blackboard tip on how to integrate web 2.0 tools in your course.

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Published on 2 Comments on Take a deep breath and…

...exhale through your mouth counting to 10.  Gaze at the floor or ceiling during this deep breath.  Then roll your shoulders back and look ahead.  This one breath will do wonders to center you and prepare you to be present for the upcoming meeting or event that you're about to join.  In her blog post, Kate Nugent of The Ariel Group calls this a "doorway moment" in that she recommends this quick vertical centering exercise before entering each meeting.  (The Ariel Group offers corporate training in communicating and establishing relationships.  They employ actors and acting coaches who give seminars to demonstrate the importance of good communication as well as techniques for achieving it.)

The Ariel Group has also been sharing various techniques at education webinars and conferences such as Pearson's CITE 2015.  It was through a webinar actually conducted by Kate Nugent that I learned the benefits of taking a deep breath before taking part in meetings and such.  Why would I, as the distance education coordinator, be writing about the "doorway moment"?  Well, we can use this centering, getting to the present technique when we're going to meet our students online in a Blackboard Collaborate session, for example.  We can also employ this technique before we record a video for our students in order to help us really focus on them and what we want to say to them.  Finally, we can insert this deep breath technique into our online courses (I'm thinking at the beginning of the study guides for their tests maybe?) and recommend that the students take a deep breath before plunging into the module.

This first step, right before we begin communicating with our students, may be the most important one in establishing our virtual presence.  We're shaking off whatever came before and moving into the present moment, fully engaged and ready to engage the students.

deep breath

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Published on 1 Comment on Conversation #40: Janet Branchaw on Mentoring for Student Success

Download Conversation #40

Janet Branchaw

A conversation with Dr. Janet Branchaw of University of Wisconsin-Madison on teaching, learning, and mentoring for student success.

Janet Branchaw, Assistant Professor of Kinesiology in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, serves as the Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Science Education and Community Engagement (WISCIENCE) and the Associate Director of the National Research Mentoring Network’s Mentor Training Core. She has led several NSF-funded projects focused on undergraduate research experiences and authored the Entering Research and 2nd edition of the Entering Mentoring curricula. Her research focuses on the development and study of student and faculty development interventions designed to improve undergraduate STEM education.

Links for this episode:

...continue reading "Conversation #40: Janet Branchaw on Mentoring for Student Success"

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Published on 2 Comments on Twitter Cheat Sheet for Educators

by Janice Florent

Twitter is an excellent tool for consuming and for learning. Twitter has proven itself to be an indispensable tool for many educators venturing into the world of education technology. Some educators are harnessing Twitter as a part of their PLN (personal learning network) to connect, share, and network. If you are interested in using Twitter, here is a Twitter Cheat Sheet for educators to get you up to speed.

Also, follow us (CAT+FD) on Twitter @xulacat.

twitter cheat sheet for educators

Published on Leave a comment on Screencasting Feedback to Your Students

by Karen Nichols

Feedback Computer Key In Blue Showing Opinions And Surveys

Faculty Focus, a publication I value a lot, posted an article on January 8, 2016 explaining the benefits of screencasting feedback to students.  Dr. Ron Martinez, the author, talked about his solution to providing students one-to-one feedback about their essays in his oversized class.  He was seeking a way to give the personalization when he could not individually meet with every student about every essay.  Using Screencast-o-matic, he was able to provide that personal touch.

There are multiple screencast apps out there, and we offer Camtasia Studio to our faculty.  However, there's a bit of a learning curve and faculty have to trek over here to our office and schedule time in advance in order to use it.  I shared this article on screencasting feedback with my colleagues here in the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development.

Dr. Jay Todd, our Associate Director, has already experimented with it in his English composition class.  Here's his feedback about screencasting feedback:

I used Screencast-O-Matic to make a video for my classes yesterday, since I waited until the last minute.... It worked pretty well, although the default quality of the video it posted to YouTube was significantly lower than I prefer. The free version doesn't allow any editing and includes a watermark, but the Pro version is only $15/year.  It has a much easier learning curve than Camtasia, at least the recording part.

So it seems that reading Dr. Martinez' article and downloading Screencast-o-matic may be useful, especially if you don't care to type pages of correction notes.  One caveat from Dr. Martinez is that screencasting your feedback is not necessarily a timesaver. I hope the fact that you can work outside of office hours, does give you more flexibility in how you distribute the time needed to provide such personalized feedback.  Let us know if you decide to try screencasting and what you think of it.

(For more information on various types of helpful feedback, see Janice Florent's recent blog post:  Give Students Feedback that Helps Them Learn.)

Published on Leave a comment on Conversation #39: Robin Runia on Interdisciplinary Team Teaching

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Robin Runia

A conversation with Dr. Robin Runia of Xavier University of Louisiana on teaching, learning, and interdisciplinary team teaching.

My experience of the biology and literature course, especially in the first half of the semester, was very multidisciplinary. First we'll have some biology content, and then we'll have some literature content, and then we'll somehow magically blend them together. I was aware of this challenge and concerned about it from the beginning.

Links for this episode:

...continue reading "Conversation #39: Robin Runia on Interdisciplinary Team Teaching"

Published on Leave a comment on Plan for Potential Classroom Disruptions Redux

by Janice Florent

Snowmageddon 2016 should be a reminder that course delivery is vulnerable to unplanned events. Potential interruptions to class activities include but are not limited to natural disasters, widespread illness, acts of violence, planned or unexpected construction-related closures, severe weather conditions, and medical emergencies. Whatever the event, an instructional continuity plan will help you to be ready to continue teaching with minimal interruption.

It's not too late to consider developing an instructional continuity plan for your current courses.

For those who missed our workshop and for those who want to learn more about instructional continuity you will find a link to the PowerPoint presentation above. Also, please visit our Instructional Continuity web page, where you will find planning guides, resources, and a recording of the workshop presentation.

image with the wording

Do you have a plan? If so, we would like to hear about it. If you had a classroom disruption and found a way for students to continue to make progress in your course, we encourage you to share it with your colleagues. Please email a brief description of what you did along with your reflections on how it worked for you, and we will post it to our Instructional Continuity web page.

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Published on 1 Comment on Give Students Feedback That Helps Them Learn

African American female looking at laptop computer screen

In a recent Teach Thought blog post, Justin Chando writes,

To tell a student “great job” or “this needs work” is a missed opportunity.

Hearing that you did a great job is wonderful. However, the problem with “great job” or “this needs work” is that it is not specific. There is no indication of what was done that was successful, and no information about how to replicate this success in future assignments.

In the blog post, Justin goes on to explain Grant Wiggins’ key characteristics of better feedback. Helpful feedback is:

Goal oriented: Goal referenced feedback creates a roadmap for students; it shows them how far they can go in the mastery of a subject or skill by outlining specific places for improvement or highlighting successful behaviors/techniques.

Transparent: A useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but transparent and tangible results related to the goal. The feedback needs to be concrete and obvious.

Actionable: Great feedback begs an obvious action/response from a student. It provides a clear course of action for the next time around or outlines a new plan for moving forward.

User-friendly: Feedback is not of much value if the student cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it. Quality feedback should be accessible to the student, clear and concise, using familiar language from the lesson/course.

Timely: Vital feedback often comes days, weeks, or even months after. Give students timely feedback and opportunities to use it in the course while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds.

Ongoing: One of the best ways to give great feedback is to give it often. Ongoing formative feedback helps students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work.

Consistent: Keeping guidance as consistent as possible allows students to hone in what needs to improve in their work and focus on making it better.

For more information on these key characteristics of better feedback including strategies to give better feedback, read Justin's Teach Thought blog post, How To Give Students Specific Feedback That Actually Helps Them Learn.

Photo credit: photo by #WOCinTech Chat is licensed under CC BY 2.0