My Blackboard Site | Staff User Guides

Staff User Guides

Control Panel: The Control Panel is where you will go to control the functionality of your course site.
Breadcrumb Guide: This is a simple step-by-step guide of the major features of Blackboard which will help you get to where you need to go.
External Links: External Links are links to Web pages outside of Blackboard that you want your students to access. This shows you how to add external links to any document area in Blackboard.
Sign-up Tool: A sign-up list is the electronic version of a paper 'sign-up sheet' on a noticeboard and can be added to any content area in a Blackboard course.
Making Your Course Available or Unavailable: These instructions outline how you can make your course site available (accessible) or unavailable (invisible) to the students who have been added to the site.
Requesting a New Course Site: A quick rundown of what you need to do if you would like a merged course site for your courses.
Creating a Banner in Adobe Photoshop: Create a banner graphic for your course site in 11 easy steps.

Student Enrolment: This tool is only available to staff with Course Director access to sites, and enables the easy addition of missing students to course sites.
Staff Enrolment: This tool enables any member of staff with instructor access to a course site to add other staff members to that course site
Self Enrolment: This tool enables any member of staff with instructor access to a course site to add other staff members to that course site
Adding Staff Information: How to add a staff profile to the staff information section of your site and edit it.
Group Management: Groups are a great way to have more control over the users within your course. For most situations, you can use the Group Management tool to create them.
Advanced Group Management: For larger sites we recommend using the Advanced Group Management tool to manage creating multiple groups more easily.
Batch Allocate Groups Tool: How to use an Excel file to allocate multiple users to groups in a single action.
Visual Student Records: Visual Student Records gives course instructors a convenient way to keep track of students with photos and descriptions.

Managing Content: How to add content to your content area, manage folders and files etc.
Image Boards: A forum, but with images! Illustrated instructions on how to set up, manage and use Image Boards.
Embedding Video: You can easily show videos on your own site. Learn how to embed Youtube videos in Blackboard.
Adaptive Release: Adaptive Release of Content provides controls to release content to users based on a set of rules provided by the Instructor.
Copy Course Content: All course content is automatically copied into the next academic year course site. Instructors can also copy content within a particular course site.
Customising your Course: You can change the look of and add more links to the Course Menu and add a banner to your course/organisation site.
Archiving your Course Site: In Blackboard 8 there are two ways to create a copy of your course site: Export course and Archive course, this will show you how.

Announcements: How to add a permanent or standard announcement and how to modify them.
Discussion Boards: Discussion Boards (forums) have become a mainstay of online communities. Short tutorials designed to get you up and running with them in Blackboard.
Sending Emails: You can send emails through Blackboard to individual users or groups of users within your course/organisation.
SMS Text Service: With Blackboard you can send email and SMS messages to members of Blackboard courses. Tutorials on working with the Short Messaging Service plugin.
Digital Drop Box: The Digital Drop Box is an easy way for students to exchange files with the Instructor.
Add Images to Announcements: How to enhance your announcements on Blackboard by illustrating it with images.
RSS Feeds in Blackboard: How to have the latest content from your favourite sites appear on your course site through Really Simple Syndication.

Turnitin: Turnitin allows students’ submissions to be automatically checked for plagiarism. Step-by-step instructions on how to set it up.
SafeAssign: SafeAssign allows students’ submissions to be automatically checked for plagiarism. Step-by-step instructions on how to set it up.
Assignment Tool: The Add Assignment feature allows you to create an assignment submission area in any of the Content Areas.
Assignment Tool Student Guide: This short guide illustrates how to access the assignment submission dialogue.