Blackboard

What’s in This Book?

Blackboard For Dummies attempts to make the Blackboard Learning System easy to understand and use for all instructors, everywhere. It’s written to keep the average user from pulling out what’s left of his hair, the mid-level user from forgetting where everything is, and the advanced user from losing interest as she starts using the newest version of the program. We won’t go too deep, and we promise that it won’t hurt a bit.

Part I: What’s Blackboard All About?

Quick — call the course-creation squad! Ah, it’s the stuff of dreams. Assuming that you’re building a course on your own and (like most of the civilized world) might not have lots of time on your hands, you need one or two things: a guide to get you moving quickly and perhaps a suggested path to complete course development for the Web. The first part of this book hands over these two solutions on a silver platter and gets you going in a meaning¬ful (and heartfelt) way. You’ll walk into Part I with a vision and walk out with the start of a beautiful product.

Part II: Easing into Blackboard

Ever wonder how all those news articles, wedding albums, and random garage-fare on eBay find their way onto the Internet? You’re about to find out. This part of the book focuses on how to get your stuff organized, uploaded,and beamed out to the screens of your audience without reinventing the wheel. We start out nice and easy with the topic of getting learners online and rarin’ to go. We continue with the nuts and bolts of uploading course materi¬als. Then, we round out everything with a stirring rendition about how to communicate with your class through Blackboard.

Part III: Earning Your Blackboard Black Belt

You’ve done well, young grasshopper. You have grabbed the fly with your chopsticks and will now be quickly be transformed into a Blackboard Master. This part of the book takes you beyond the program’s simple features and empowers you to leverage Blackboard to improve learning. It’s huge. You’ll also figure out how to give out a quiz that you don’t have to grade by hand. After presenting a virtual laundry list of additional tools, we’ll show you the magic that is online grading and demonstrate how to reuse the same course over and over again. To quizzes . . . and beyond!

Part IV: The Part of Tens

This traditional part of a For Dummies book is chock-full of additional tips from the twisted brains of the authors. This part extols the virtues of a well-tuned course menu, the true value of good organization (don’t stop reading just because of that one), the best questions to ask your system administra¬tor, and the “vroom vroom” effect of good online communication, among other tried-and-true ideas from the minds of genius.

Part V: Appendixes

The appendixes in the back of this book supplement your Blackboard experi¬ence by adding all kinds of useful information. You can read about teaching with the help of technology, get an overview of the Blackboard Content System, and fill out a handy checklist of items you might have forgotten or want to add later. We even give you a guide to handy resources on the Web so that you can continue to add to your information arsenal. Finally, the glossary clues you in to the meaning of all kinds of Blackboard terms.

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