Productive Scholar: Get Your Group On: Mak­ing the Most of Blackboard’s Capa­bil­i­ties for Teach­ing and Man­ag­ing Sections

On Thurs­day, Sep­tem­ber 20th, Den­nis Hood came to talk about groups and other lesser known fea­tures in Black­board at Prince­ton, as well as brand new fea­tures. Hood specif­i­cally talked about Black­board Mobile, where you can visit Black­board course con­tent on your iPad, for instance. Another new ser­vice, Piazza, is a new gath­er­ing place in Black­board, where peo­ple can ask ques­tions anony­mously, cre­ate groups, and get feed­back. Inter­ac­tive Rubrics were intro­duced, in which instruc­tors can show in a clearer way how stu­dents are graded in assign­ments, show­ing points awarded for the level of qual­ity in writ­ing and how the instruc­tor defines “qual­ity”. Kaltura Media was also intro­duced, where stu­dents and fac­ulty can upload media, like movies and audio files, directly, to save for them­selves or share with the class. Hood then demon­strated how to cre­ate groups and how they can be used to help stu­dents gather and inter­act online, and showed many other new fea­tures in the cur­rent instal­la­tion of Black­board at Princeton.

Den­nis Hood starts his 13th year of man­ag­ing Black­board for Prince­ton in Octo­ber. He also uses Black­board in teach­ing his speech com­mu­ni­ca­tions course at John Jay Col­lege of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice, CUNY.