1. DOWN ARROWS

Blackboard 8 introduced new  “contextual menus” – the down-arrows icon on the Grade Center. Don’t be afraid to click through some of these icons. You will discover many familiar features you have been used over years as well as some new ones. Mouse over a grade and a student name; you will see even more.

2. DRAG AND DROP

We all like to “Drag and Drop”  because it is so easy. For example, can you  re-arrange your Grade Center to make sense to you and to your students simply by dragging and dropping? Yes, you can. Go to Manage–>Organize Grade Center.

Watch the short movie below to see Neal Caidin shows you how to reorganize your Grade Center along with some other tricks.

3. HIDE GRADE COLUMNS

Often it is easier to enter student grades if some columns are temporarily hidden from you*. Also, you may want to hide grading columns you will never use that appear by default in Blackboard (such as Student ID, Availability status or Username columns, etc ).

*WARNING: “Hide” only affects the instructor’s view of the Grade Center, not the student’s view.  Students can still see their grades that you “Hide”.  “Hide” in this context means “to hide from my current view of the overall Grade Center.” To hide grades from students, choose Modify Column, and then choose “No” for “Show this column in My Grades”.  “My Grades” is what Blackboard calls the student view. By default, students see all grades.

4. FEWER “SUBMIT” AND “OK” CLICKS

Use the “Next” or “Previous” arrows, or “Go” at the top right to jump to an individual student or assignment column, or to navigate sequentially. This will save you a few clicks when you “Submit” and “Ok” and go back and forth between the main grade view and Grade Details.

5. SMART VIEWS

You can create subsets of grade views (so called “Smart Views”) which meet specific criteria.  For example, Smart Views enable you to look into individual users in more detail, examine specific groups to investigate, or filter students based on their performance on a specific item.  Once created and saved, a Smart View becomes an item on the Current View drop-down menu of the Grade Center page.  To create a Smart View,  go to Manage, and Add Smart View.

Bonus tip: ICON LEGEND

Many people have asked me what the symbol  or  next to grades means. I didn’t know either. So, I looked up the Icon Legend and found out what I wanted to know. The Icon Legend is located at the lower right corner of the Grade Center! Hope at least one icon (the error icon) never occurs on your Grade Center.

To learn more, see our help page for the Blackboard Grade Center and visit the Blackboard support website. If you would like more help with Blackboard, request an office visit and we will come to you.

In 2009-10, Duke’s elearning Roadmap Committee is actively gathering input from Duke instructors and students about tools they use for teaching and learning. The Committee will assess the needs of the campus community to identify tools, support and infrastructure that should be centrally provided. Whether you use blogs or wikis, Blackboard or VoiceThread, Micrograde or Maple TA, Second Life or Flickr, the Committee needs your insight and ideas about what’s most important for the Duke community. What works well for the kind of courses you teach? What could be improved?  What’s missing? Learn about the Committee’s process, findings and ways to get involved and share your ideas at a new web site, http://elearning.duke.edu. At this site, you can…

• learn more about events we’re sponsoring and ways you can participate in the conversation (Get Involved), including an event for faculty coming up soon on Thursday, November 12 (register)
• stay in touch with (and comment on!) what we’re hearing from members of the campus community (Your Feedback)
• monitor our activities for the 2009-2010 academic year (Our Goal and Our Timeline)

Kathy Franz (Duke Chemistry) expects her students to gather resources from the chemistry literature, and share them in her course. She has tried some social bookmarking tools, but some have difficulty finding bibliographic data from her chemistry journals. She is now trying Zotero. Zotero is an extension on Firefox that helps you collect, manage and cite your research sources from your web browser. The latest version allows you to sync and back up Zotero libraries, and create public or private groups to share references.

Jonathan Mattingly (Duke Math) enthusiastically uses Zotero to collect bibliographic data, and format citations for his publications. He uses the group feature to share papers with his students, and to add to their reading lists as he finds references. He’s also experimenting with sharing a Zotero library with the Math department, to benefit students.

Features:

• Participants in a group can get an RSS feed to be notified when new documents are added to the library.
• For PDFs already stored on your computer, Zotero searches the internet for trusted bibliographic information, so you do not have type or copy-paste bibliographic information.
• Zotero learns how to resolve URLs to restricted sources.
• Zotero can output references in many different styles.
• Zotero can save searches across your saved references, so a saved search becomes like a continuously updating folder.
• Zotero is open-source, so it is continuously improving and anyone can add new features.

Want more?

• Watch the video to see how Zotero works, then download and try it.
• See some of Dr. Mattingly’s papers listed on Zotero to see the data Zotero saves for each source.
• Read more about it on the library hacks blog, and our blog (Zotero is a reason to use Firefox)

For keeping track of citations and managing your references, there are other options

CiteULike is also popular among researchers for managing and discovering scholarly references, and can provide sharing either publically or with devined groups. Unlike Zotero, CiteULike will work with any browser.

If you already have a computer full of PDFs, you might want to try Mendeley, It is both academic desktop software for managing & sharing research papers, and a website where you can back up and manage your research papers online, discover research trends, and connect to other researchers. Library Hacks explains the difference between Mendeley and Zotero.

Connotea is another online reference management system for researchers, put out by the Nature publishing group.

Duke has licensed EndNote and RefWorks, two commercial bilbliographic tools. Compare them with Zotero.

Because each tool handles references differently, evaluate them for your specific needs. Try each of them as you search for scholarly references in your field, to see how they handle your journals articles, and meet your needs for sharing.

Our colleagues in the Office of Information Technology, OIT, are working hard to improve their capture service (DukeCapture, aka Lectopia) and they would appreciate your feedback in the surveys linked below. Surveys are open until Friday November 13, 2009.

Instructor Survey

This survey is designed for use by Duke faculty, instructors and others with direct classroom instruction responsibilities. It is intended to elicit information about how instructors want to use capture (recording) in the classroom setting.

Staff Survey

This survey is intended to elicit general information about the specific features and requirements Duke technical staff would like to see be included in the centrally supported capture service moving forward. Lectopia site administrators and IT/classroom support staff who are currently supporting the use of DukeCapture (or a similar capture tool) in their local settings are most likely to have in interest in the questions this survey asks, although anyone is welcome to participate.

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Duke faculty  Jennifer Ahern-Dodson (Writing) and Kevin Caves (Biomedical Engineering) are featured in the article How Tiny Camcorders are Changing Education published in eLearn Magazine.

Ahern-Dodson and Caves participated in CIT’s  Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program, to share ideas about teaching with video with other faculty.  In the article, they describe how they used Flip cameras from the Duke Digital Initiative for student projects in their courses.