Blackboard Essentials for Teachers

Build and deliver great courses using this popular Learning Management System

• Learn to use the essential features of Blackboard to create and administer great courses
• Add interaction to your courses with discussion boards, blogs, and wikis
• Create meaningful tests and graded assignments

In Detail

Blackboard is the world’s most popular commercial learning management system. With Blackboard you can construct and deliver professional quality elearning courses with ease. Its many features, which allow you to manage courses, grading and assessments, and social collaboration, are the standard against which other learning management systems are measured.

Blackboard Essentials for Teachers shows you how to use Blackboard’s most essential features by guiding you through the development of a demonstration course, built on Blackboard’s free site for teachers, coursesites.com. You will also learn more about Blackboard’s most important features, such as the gradebook, using clear instructions to guide you every step of the way.

By following an example course, this book will guide you, step-by-step, through creating your own Blackboard course. Start by adding static material for students to view, such as pages, links, and media. Then, add interaction to your courses, with discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Most importantly, engage your students in your course by communicating with them, assessing them, and putting them into groups. Blackboard Essentials for Teachers will enable you to take your elearning course from inception, to construction, to delivery.

What you will learn from this book

• Create web pages using Blackboard’s editor
• Organize your course with pages and modules
• Add files and media for students to download
• Interact with students using discussion boards, blogs, and wikis
• Test your students by building and administering full-featured online tests
• Assess your students with submitted assignments
• Ease your workload by managing groups of students
• Communicate with your students using messages and announcements

Approach

This book develops a sample site with lots of step-by-step instructions and screenshots to get you up and running in no time at all.

Who this book is written for

If you are a teacher or course builder, you need only basic computer skills to get the most from this book. You don’t need any background in online teaching or building Web pages.