Category Archives: Pedagogy

Reflections on a Text Analysis Assignment

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In Spring 2013, I taught LAT312K: Intermediate Latin at the University of Texas-Austin.  This was the fourth and last required course in the Latin sequence at UT and focused on Vergil’sAeneid.

Word Cloud

Word Cloud of a Translation of Vergil’s Aeneid

The course functioned both as a cap to a student’s Latin experience (several of my students were graduating seniors finishing off their required courses) and a gateway into advanced study of Latin literature and culture for Classics majors.  One of my goals in the course was introducing students to a variety of approaches scholars take to the study of Latin literature in general and Vergil’s Aeneid in particular. This goal allowed me to include a digital humanities element in the course by having my students experiment with digital methodologies.  One such assignment focused on text analysis.  I include the assignment below, as well as my reflections on how this pedagogical experiment went.

Assignment Directions

Text Analysis

For most of this semester we have been focusing on a close reading of Latin.  Now we’re going to try distant reading.  You can find our more about this idea here:

Schulz, Kathryn. “The Mechanic Muse – What Is Distant Reading?” The New York Times, June 24, 2011, sec. Books / Sunday Book Review. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-what-is-distant-reading.html.

For this discussion you are going to play with distant reading Vergil’s Aeneid in English:

1. Read “What is Text Analysis?”: http://tada.mcmaster.ca/Main/WhatTA

2. Play with Text Analysis tools here: http://voyant-tools.org/

a. Find out more about Voyant Tools using the TAPOR Portal (http://www.tapor.ca/) by doing a search for Voyant.  Note that some tools have basis descriptions while others have reviews with more information on how to use them. Pick one tool to play with that you think might be useful in analyzing the Aeneid.  Please explain why you picked this tool.

b. Find a text of the Aeneid in English.

Try project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/v#a129

Be sure to note who the translator is. (see the bibrec tab)

c. Try at least one Voyant tool and compare and contrast the experience of using it to doing a close reading of the text. How useful might this type of analysis be for analyzing the Aeneid? What challenges do you see with this methodology?

Reflections

Kolb's Learning Cycle

Kolb’s Learning Cycle

This assignment was completed outside of class, with students sharing their results in an online discussion board.  Then, we followed our online discussion with an in-class discussion aimed at synthesizing findings and analysis from the online discussion and reflecting on the overall experience. This sequence was designed to follow Kolb’s learning cycle, with students trying out what they had learned about the Aeneid by experimenting with text analysis, leading to a concrete experience, then reflecting on that experience in the online discussion, and using the in-class discussion to draw conclusions from the learning experience.  In the in-class discussion I wanted my students  to come to the abstract concept of considering how digital tools might change interpretive practice.  Linking the online and in class discussions also follows principles of good blended learning design in laying out clear links between in and out of class activities.  In class discussion expanded online discussion rather than repeating it. Admittedly, I’m writing my own reflection many months later, but in my opinion I’d say this overall assignment was a partial success. Students were able to complete the assignment–both using the tools and writing the online discussion–but for the most part they did not fall in love with text analysis.  Still, our discussion in class did include reflection on issues of digital scholarship and revealed some insights into the text that they gained from the experience.

What Went Wrong or What I Would Change If I Did This Again

I was disappointed that these students didn’t fall in love with digital methodologies.  I think I fell prey to the fallacy that I often warn faculty members about–just because it is digital doesn’t mean students will like it.  The overall assignment needed better framing to explain why they might use text analysis.  I did try to give them some context for distant reading and chose a NY Times article on digital humanities rather than a more specialized digital humanities article because I wanted them to have an accessible text.  I think, however, that the article was more negative than I remembered and some students picked up on those negative parts, proclaiming how much they loved close reading and interpretation and how bad distance reading was.  (The next week I assigned an article that was a beautiful example of close reading and interpretation–some students criticized that reading because they felt the author pushed the interpretation too far.  Then I realized my students were good humanists trained to critique whatever they read.) If I did this assignment again, I would provide the general framing in class and assign only an informational article focused specifically on text analysis as a methodology, e.g., Geoffrey Rockwell’s “What is Text Analysis?”  While the debate on the limitations of distant reading is a good one for students to consider, it was also somewhat of a distraction when they hadn’t even tried any sort of computer-assisted text analysis.

I also framed this assignment very much as an experiment and let their own inclinations guide their choice of tool.  I wanted them to use the TAPOR portal so they would learn about it as a resource for the future.  I also wanted to introduce an element of play into the class.  Some of the students chose tools that were less successful than others, so for future assignments I might instead suggest that they choose from a pre-determined set of tools.  If this were a different class, I might also include this exercise in a sequence of assignments to scaffold engagement with computer-assisted text analysis.

I think my discussion prompt also unintentionally invites criticism more than a discussion of value.  In asking, “How useful might this type of analysis be . . .” and “What challenges . . . ” I set myself up for some negative answers.  Based on my past teaching experience, I know that students of the Classics can be very conservative when it comes to technology–after all the discipline of Classics does privilege old things.  From the point of view of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, even the codex is a new-fangled invention, not to mention the digital text.  While resources like the Perseus Project demonstrate the early engagement of Classics in humanities computing, in the undergraduate curriculum this project is often represented as a resource for texts (a tool for consumption) more than as a tool for analysis (a tool for “generative scholarship” to use Ed Ayers’ term).  In other words, undergraduate students of classics can be even more disinclined to think in terms of digital methodologies for scholarship.  Though my students mostly brought digital devices to class–laptops, tablets, smart phones–and used them to read our Latin text and take notes, they had not had much practice in using such tools for humanities research (which was, after all, the point of my assignment).  Overall, then, I would say I needed to provide more positive framing for this assignment–I misjudged how much I needed to “sell” digital scholarship to my students.  In the future I might also start from the tools for analysis built into  the Perseus Project, with which they were already familiar rather than Voyant Tools.  I had chosen Voyant because of the potential application outside of Classics, but a tool built for Classicists might have been an easier sell.

What Went Right

Despite my dissatisfaction with the results, I do think this assignment was valuable for a number of reasons.  First of all, it exposed my students to a methodology of digital scholarship that they might otherwise never have tried.  At least one student said that he liked it because it made more sense to him than close reading and interpretation.  This reaction demonstrates how quantitative approaches to the humanities can be a bridge to students trained in more quantitative disciplines like the sciences.

The most valuable tools for my students seemed to have been Voyant Cirrus andVoyant Links. Both of these confirmed themes that we had already discussed for the Aeneid.  Still, that experience validates the tools rather than offering the new insights I wanted students to gain.

A more interesting insight came from an unexpected place.  I was having students analyze translations of the Aeneid (an admittedly flawed approach–in a perfect world they would be analyzing the Latin texts), so some of these insights were based more on the translator than the work of Vergil.  I intentionally did not explain how to use stop words (common words like “the”, “and”, “of”, etc., that should be excluded from analysis) because I wanted to see if my students would figure out on their own that this is one challenge of doing text analysis.  Some of them did and used the the tool directions to discover how to exclude those words.  Other students didn’t use stop words and had some interesting grammatical insights.  Because prepositions hadn’t been excluded they noticed how prevalent the words “to”, “for”, “from”, and “by” are in translations of theAeneid.  As it happens, these prepositions can be used to translate the dative or ablatives cases from Latin.  While I had been drilling them on datives and ablatives for much of the semester, this exercise really drove home to them how important it was that they memorize the various uses of these grammatical cases.  Perhaps this insight also just confirms something they should have known already, but it gave them empirical evidence–they didn’t have to just take my word for it.  For this insight alone it might be worth it for students to do some text analysis of the Aeneid at the beginning of the semester rather than later.  They might also compare multiple translations of the Aeneid by using text analysis without having to read all of them–a truly distant reading–to get an initial look at what themes might emerge.

Learning Outcomes

I would definitely do such an assignment again if I were teaching the same class.  With some of the changes I suggested above, I hope it would be more successful.  And, whether my students love digital scholarship or not, I still think it is important to expose them to these new methodologies.  Even if they do not become professional digital humanists, as Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell have argued,

From search engine indexing to sophisticated methods of literary analysis, the computer has become an indispensable tool in dealing with the massive influx of digitized textual data in our information age. Liberal arts students need to understand automated methods of text analysis because they underlie how we find, use, and share information today.

Finally, for humanists and scientists alike computer-assisted text analysis affords a different way to look at a text one that might yield insights not easily realized by traditional methods of close-reading.

More Resources and Sample Assignments for Text Analysis

I’ve covered text analysis in many workshops introducing digital humanities.  Here are some other resources, sample assignments, and ideas for using text analysis.

Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell. “Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis: Approaches to Learning New Methodologies.” Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, ed. Brett Hirsch. Open Book Publishers, 2013, pp. 241-254.

Sample Assignments

Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Ideas for using Wordle

  • Use wordle on an assignment text to pull out key issues and themes. (by student in writing class)
  • Use wordle on a paper to make sure the right themes are emphasized. (by writing instructor)
  • Use wordle on text survey results to find hidden themes.

Digital Reading Practices for the Liberal Arts Classroom

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IAnnotate screenshot

Reading and Annotating on My iPad with iAnnotate PDF

Today I’m leading a Tech Snack at. St. Edward’s University on “Digital Reading Practices for the Liberal Arts Classroom.”  Tech Snacks bring together faculty members, instructional technology staff, and others at St. Edward’s University to discuss the pedagogical uses of various technologies.  This tech snack will look at ways that reading has changed in the digital age.  My title is borrowed from a NITLE Seminar I organized last year in which  Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell introduced the NITLE community to computer-assisted text analysis via Voyant Tools.  When I first proposed this topic, I imagined that I would discuss how I had tried an assignment built around this methodology for the intermediate Latin class on Vergil’s Aeneid that I taught last Spring.  I still plan on sharing this example as a way of exploring how computers can offer a different way into the close reading that we typically teach in the literature classroom. That is, computer-assisted text analysis is one of the new methodologies championed by the digital humanities community.  But, I also want to spend some time discussing how we might continue traditional reading practices in a digital environment.  How do we translate our analog, print reading practices into a digital world and what other affordances might that environment offer?

Earlier this year at our tech snack on mobile devices we ended up focusing on the challenges of reading digitally and replicating print reading practices like highlighting and annotation.  One key challenge for students is that there is not a magic bullet in terms of platforms for reading nor even an agreed upon standard to allow for interoperability.  I use a variety of tools depending on medium and type of reading (I also documented my reading practices in this earlier post: How Humanists Read and Why We Need a Better (Electronic) Reading Ecosystem):

  • Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) for highlighting and annotating the web and saving bookmarks in the cloud with added tags, so I can find them later on any device.
  • iAnnotatePDF (http://www.branchfire.com/iannotate/): For reading, highlighting, and taking notes on my iPad.
  • Kindle for reading on my iPad and iPhone (I don’t usually use highlights).
  • Zotero for tracking bibliography  in the cloud with added tags, so I can find entries later on any device.  I sometimes export notes from iAnnotate and add them to these records.
  • Evernote (http://evernote.com/) for notes from meetings  in the cloud with added tags, so I can find them later on any device.  I can also clip articles (with annotation) from the web, add tags, and same them to notebooks, but I’m not ready to replace diigo with evernote.  I can also forward emails to a notebook with tags.  Since much of my work is done via email and meetings, this platform comes closest to aggregating all I need.
  • Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/) for saving online articles to read later, but I have a bad habit of never getting time to read these.

Most of my reading is done individually and requires ways for me to find things (articles, notes, etc.) later when I need it for some project, talk, workshop, etc.  I hope that today’s discussion will get at some of the reading practices we are trying to inculcate in students.  What should our learning goals be for student reading practices?  I’ll share results from today’s tech snack.

Social Annotation

I also hope we spend some time discussing social annotation because 44% of St. Edward’s faculty who responded to this fall’s survey on Academic Innovation reported that they do not use social annotation but would like to. (Of course, this was also one of the technologies that faculty members also reported they were least familiar with.)  The ability to read  and annotate collaboratively in real time is one of the affordances offered by a digital medium.

Here are some tools I know about for social annotation:

Improve Students’ Ability to Function as a Team

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TeamworkStudents need to know how to work in a team if they want to succeed in any organization. Unfortunately, students are often left to their own devices when it comes to actually working together as a team. Faculty share several important concerns when evaluating team performance. One is how to equitably reward the individual team members when only few students did the work. Another issue is how do students learn to be better team members when they only receive feedback at the end of the course, too late to make any changes in their behavior. Students also need to understand the importance of using a methodology when working on team projects.

Dr. Mark Poulos, Professor of Business Administration, and Dr. Angel Tazzer, Faculty Support Manager, have developed a proven methodology using a wiki to improve students’ ability to function as a team while completing course assignments. The methodology is easy to implement and adapt to your specific classroom needs and can be implemented using the native wiki tool in Blackboard or in any other wiki.

Consider this methodology if you want to:

  • Reflect and share the reasons for using team assignments in the classroom including the benefits, issues, and best practices for their implementation.
  • Learn a methodology that can be used in your classroom to improve the ability of students to function as a team.
  • Establish a feedback and accountability process in which the students may learn and modify their behavior in future assignments.

Feel free to contact Mark Poulos (markp@stedwards.edu) or Angel Tazzer (angelt@stedwards.edu) for more information and wiki templates.

Credits
Working Together Teamwork Puzzle Concept. [Digital Image]. Retrieved from
www.flickr.com/photos/lumaxart/2137737248/

Speed Up Your Grading

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3 Tips For Making the Blackboard Grade Book Easier to Use

In this Tech Snack on October 18, 2014 we demonstrated several easy steps that can help save you time and frustration while grading.

1. See All Your Students with “Edit Rows Displayed”

Blackboard defaults to showing you the first 10 students in your roster. If you want to see your entire roster of students, click on Edit Rows Displayed and select the number of students you have. This makes it much easier to see all of your students at the same time.

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2. Minimize Scrolling through Assignments with “Column Organization”

Blackboard also defaults to displaying the most recent grade book entry to the right of the existing entries. The column organization feature allows you to reorder your grade book display as you see fit. For example, you might want to display the most recent entry first. Managing your columns is a great way to minimize the need for scrolling.

2014-02-06_14-25-59            2014-02-06_14-26-49

3. Use Excel to Manage Grades via “Download Roster “

Blackboard allows Instructors to download a current version of their course grade book as an Excel file. Instructors can use this feature to manually enter grades into a spreadsheet and upload it to Blackboard again. Downloading the grade book is also a great way to create attendance charts and sign-in sheets quickly.

2014-02-06_15-01-15          2014-02-06_15-01-56

 

There are also a variety of video tutorials available on the Instructional Technology website.  Here’s a link to our BlackBoard Grade Book overview.

Interactive Video with Avatars

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What is an Avatar and a Voki?

An avatar is a figure or character that you can create and customize for online use. Vokis are speaking avatars that could be used for online interaction.

  • Users can create an account with different services such as Voki.
    • Voki can be used to create speaking avatars and use them as an effective learning tool.

Ideas for Uses of Avatars in the Classroom:

  • Connecting via online learning: Faculty who teach online and blended courses could enhance their personal presence in the class through the use of avatars. Avatars could be used for virtual lectures in place of text course materials.
  • Solving problems and gaining real-world experience through case studies: Faculty could use avatars to demonstrate case studies. Students will benefit from practice in applying the material to real-life situations.
  • Historical Reenactments and Teaching Moments Students can reenact historical events in order to gain new perspectives beyond the mere facts. Avatars can be used to teach various theories which may be hard to understand from an external point of view.

Resources

  1. 8 Great Avatar Creation Tools for Teachers
  2. Creating Avatars
  3. 10 Ways to Use Avatars in Education

Open Educational Resources

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This page contains a list of a variety of open educational resources to support course content and academic scholarship.  Open content is published by a wide variety of academic sources and partnerships.  Included in this list are links to university published content that has been made freely available.  In addition, a number of open content repositories are listed here (i.e. MERLOT) which are designed to aggregate listings of open content published across a variety of sites (i.e. MIT's Open Courseware).  In addition, many social media sites (such as the few listed here) also provide ways to search for "open" content.  Links have also been provided to open textbook sites (i.e. Connexions) as well as sites to support academic scholarship (i.e. Academic Commons).

 

It is important to note that even with open educational resources, freely distributed content is still copyrighted.  Content that is published under an "open" license does not always provide the right to reuse/republish and/or to remix the work.  Please check the Creative Commons license for individual works for more information, and visit the Creative Commons site to learn more about open licensing.

 

University sponsored open courseware

MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials
"MIT OpenCourseWare is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity."

University of Michigan | Open.Michigan
This site offers, "open initiatives supporting free and open educational resources from the University of Michigan." The collection is open to the publish and is easily searchable across a range of course materials, videos, tools and student work. Material is licensed for re-use.

Harvard Open Courses for Free | Open Learning Initiative
"Take free Harvard online courses through Harvard Extension School's Open Learning Initiative. Course videos feature Harvard faculty." You can find a link to Harvard's EdX courses from this easily searchable site.

Tufts OpenCourseWare
"A free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world." Tufts Open Courseware is sponsored by Tufts University and offers open access to select university materials. The main page links to courses by school.

Open Yale Courses
"Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn." Yale offers a wide range of courses and materials for public use. Yale is also listed on iTunes.

Webcast Berkeley: UC Berkeley Video and Podcasts for Courses & Events
"Webcast.berkeley is the campus service for recording and publishing course and campus events for students and learners around the globe. Audio and video recordings of class lectures and special events are processed and made available to everyone through webcast.berkeley.edu." Berkeley has long been a pioneer of making lecture materials freely accessible. Video recordings are hosted on Youtube and course materials is easily searchable and covers a wide range of disciplines.
 
iTunesU
iTunesU is a services provided by Apple, through its iTunes Store. iTunesU is home to content from scores of universities who have made educational content in the form of audio and video podcasts freely accessible. However, as with other open resources, free does not mean all content can be re-used and re-mixed. Check the copyright for specific works for usage rights.

Stanford on iTunes U
"The first publicly available iTunes U site. A comprehensive online audio and video collection from Stanford University. Celebrating 5 years of edutechnosharification."

Searchable open content repositories

OER Commons
The OER Commons was created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education and is a result of "alliances between trusted content providers and creative users and re-users of Open Educational Resources". OER content is well-organized and searchable by grade level and subject material.

DnaTube.com – Scientific Video and Animation Site
" DnaTube is a non-profit video site which is aiming to be a visual scientific resource for its visitors making scientific concepts easily understandable." A wide variety of video resources are available here, and the site is easily searchable. In addition to videos, you can search the site for course lectures.

MERLOT – Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
" Free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. " Although not a comprehensive catalog of all open online resources, MERLOT aggregates peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed open content and contains links to a range of content types, from courses hosted by universities ,text materials to video lectures and multimedia learning objects.

OTTER — University of Leicester
OTTER stands for Open, Transferable and Technology-enabled Educational Resources. OTTER is hosted by the University of Leicester in the UK. Course content includes a range of materials published as open material by the University of Leicester.

Curriki
"Open Educational Resources – Free Learning Resources for the World". Curriki offers open educational content for K-16 content. Content is searchable by topic and grade level.

Learning Resource Exchange
The Learning Resource Exchange is provided by the European Schoolnet and provides content from a wide range of partners including Penn State, the Open University, and Khan Academy.

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
The CCCOER is a consortium of community colleges and universities that offers OER content through a catalog of 750 open textbooks and 41 online courses.

Open Textbook Resources

Connexions – Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities
Connexions is hosted by Rice University and is a respository for open, online textbooks. Content covers a range of college level topic areas, and includes peer reviewed content. Courses are organized into modules, and includes text, audio and video materials.

Flat World Knowledge
Flat World Knowledge offers visitors 32 different online texts to use for free across a variety of subject areas.

Open publishing platforms and research tools

Academic Commons
The Academic Commons was created by the Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College and provides the academic community an open platform for publishing on topics related to liberal education as well as the uses of technology in liberal education.
 
eScholarship | University of California
"eScholarship provides Open-Access scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide". Although publishing is limited to U of C faculty and students, this content is open and searchable.

Massively Online Course (MOOC) initiatives

Udacity | Free Online Courses. Advance your College Education & Career
"Learn. Think. Do. Free Online Classes in Programming, Computer Science, Math, Sciences and Entrepreneurship from Top University and Industry Instructors." Udacity offer Massively Online Courses–otherwise known as MOOCs. Course content is available to those who sign up for courses. However, it is unclear whether content is licensed to be re-used and re-mixed.

EdX: MITX
EdX is a partnership originally founded by MIT and Harvard to offer open e-learning through Massively Online Courses (MOOCs). Courses are available from member institutions. As with other MOOC providers, content licensing is based on the copyright of individual works. Not all content is available for re-use and re-mixing.

Khan Academy
"The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere."  Notably, MOOC content is searchable from the main site, without the need to enroll in a class.

Coursera
Coursera offers 200+ courses across 20 categories, "spanning the Humanities, Medicine, Biology, Social Sciences, Mathematics, Business, Computer Science, and many others. Whether you're looking to improve your resume, advance your career, or just learn more and expand your knowledge, we hope there will be multiple courses that you find interesting."

Open Content Licensing

Creative Commons
"Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators." The Creative Commons site provides in-depth information on licensing for open content and is an excellent resource for people looking to use as well as to publish open content.

Social Media Site examples with Open Educational Content

Vimeo, Your Videos Belong Here
Vimeo is a video hosting platform. According their TOU, video content on Vimeo is considered, by default to be licensed as "open content" through creative commons licensing. A wide range of non-commercial and educational content can be found here.

Slideshare
Slideshare is a social media presentation tool that is used by a range of academic professionals who have shared presentation materials. Materials can be found on a wide range of academic and non-academic topics, with many presentations shared as downloadable resources.

Youtube EDU
A wealth of open educational videos can be found on Youtube, and many open educational resources point to videos published on youtube.  However, you can search youtube directly for content to find these resources as well.
 

 
 

Blackboard Tips

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Blackboard Tips: Grade Center

A Calculated Column gathers data from multiple Grade Center columns and performs a calculation such as an average grade for a set of assignments. New courses and restored courses contain two Calculated columns by default: a Total Points column and a Weighted Grade column. To create a new calculated column, select a type such as “average column” from the “Create Calculated Column” list. On the following page enter a column name and set other options, such as whether to display the column to students. Click submit when you are finished.

Blackboard Tips: Make Your Course Available

To make a course available in Blackboard, go into your course’s homepage on Blackboard. On the Control Panel on the left side of the screen, click ‘Customization,’ and then under ‘Customization,’ select ‘Properties.’ This will take you to the Properties window. Under ‘Set Availability’ check ‘Yes’ to make the course available, then click ‘Submit’ at the bottom of the page.

Blackboard Tips: Edit Mode in Blackboard

When you are in Blackboard, if you find that you cannot edit your content, look at the edit mode button in the top right corner of the page. If the edit button is switched to the off position then click it and it will switch on. You should now be able to edit your content. The purpose of having the edit mode button is to allow you to see your Blackboard course from a student perspective. It can be useful to check your edits with the edit mode off when you are done.

Blackboard Tips: How to ensure that your students can reply to your Blackboard announcement e-mails

When you create an announcement in Blackboard, you will be presented with the option “E-mail Announcement” to send the announcement to your students via email. If you want your students to be able to respond to you directly, be sure that you check the “Send a copy of this announcement immediately” box. Otherwise, Blackboard will send the email from a generic IT address and any responses from your students will be directed to IT rather than back to you. To ensure that the email is sent from your address, make sure to check the box to the right of “E-mail Announcement.”

Blackboard Tips: Creating a Turnitin Assignment

The process for creating an assignment in Turnitin is different than creating a normal assignment. To do this go to your blackboard homepage click the “Assignments” link in the course menu. Mouse over “create assessment” and select “Turnitin Assignment” form the drop down menu. Select the type of assignment you wish to create from the three options presented. Enter an assignment title, a point value, and the start, due and post dates. Once you are finished click “submit”. Your Turnitin assignment will appear under Assignments.

Blackboard Tips: Course Reports

Faculty can use the Course Reports area to generate reports on course usage and activity. Faculty can view a specific student’s usage to determine if students are actively using course materials. The report appears in the form of graphical charts. Course reports provide different ways to view information about student activity and content usage. To run a new report, select a course you are teaching and open the course Control Panel, click on Evaluation and then Course Reports. Choose your desired options and run the report.

Blackboard Tips: Clearing Attempts in Turnitin

If you need to clear a student’s attempt in Turnitin, go to the Full Grade Center and find the cell that corresponds to the student’s attempt that you would like to clear. Then click the double arrow box to the right of the cell and select the third option “Attempt” from the menu. In the Modify Grade window, select the “Clear attempt” button. Click submit to save changes.

Blackboard Tips: Course Reports

Faculty can use the Course Reports area to generate reports on course usage and activity. Faculty can view a specific student’s usage to determine if students are actively using course materials. The report appears in the form of graphical charts. Course reports provide different ways to view information about student activity and content usage. To run a new report, select a course you are teaching and open the course Control Panel, click on Evaluation and then Course Reports. Choose your desired options and run the report.

Blackboard Tips: Reordering Items in a Content Area or Menu Bar

In order to move items in a content area, mouse over the top right corner of the item box (or the double pronged arrow to the right of the box in the case of the menu bar items) until the cursor changes into the four pronged arrow. Now simply click and drag the item to where you want it to be.

Blackboard Tips: Downloading Assignments from Grade Center

To download assignment files that students have submitted, go to Grade Center and click on the double arrow to the right of the assignment that you would like to download. Select “Assignment File Download” from the drop-down list. On the next page you can choose to download all files or just the files from selected students. Click “submit” once you have selected which files to download, and then click the “Download Assignments Now” link. Save the .zip file to your drive and open it to view the files.

Blackboard Tips: Copying Files from One Course to Another

If there is a file that already exists in one course that you wish to make available in another course you must first locate the file and click the double down arrow on the right side of the file’s name. From the drop down menu, select the “Copy” option. Then select the course and folder in which you wish the file to appear. Finally, click “Submit.” Your file should now be available in both courses. To move a file from one course to another, simply follow the same procedure as above but instead of selecting the “Copy” option from the drop-down menu, you will select the “Move” option.