Blackboard

Blackboard at CASE: A QuickStart Guide for Students

• Logging In
• My Instituition
• Sending E-mail
• User Directory
• Courses
• Digital Dropbox
• Sending & Receiving Files
• Deleting Files from the Drop Box
• Sharing files with other students
• Assignment Manager
• Discussion Boards
• Searching for a message or author

This document provides a basic introduction to some of the main features of Blackboard. For more complete details regarding specific communication tools (e-mail, discussion board, virtual classroom, etc.) see the Communication Tools page

Logging In

When logging into Blackboard, you must have an activated CASE network-ID and password. If you have not activated your network ID, the following link will help you to create or manage your account.

If you wish to activate your network ID, reset your password, or otherwise manage your CASE Network ID:

https://its-services.case.edu/my-case-identity/activate/ .

To log into Blackboard

1. Go to the Blackboard home page (http://blackboard.case.edu/) and click the Login button
2. On the Login page, fill in your user name and password. This will be the same ID and password as your CASE email ID and password. You will be taken to the My Institution page.
3. If you have any questions or problems, see the FAQ here.

My Institution

My Institution is a place to keep track of course announcements, personal tasks, and assignments. It lists the courses in which you are enrolled. It also contains your personal information and any organizations to which you belong. Finally, it allows you to send e-mail.

The steps for adding tasks and calendar events are very similar. Click on Tasks to view the list of tasks, or Calendar to view the list of calendar events. Click on Add Task to add a task, or Add Event to add a calendar event. Fill in the information and submit. The new task or event should now show up on the list. See the Calendar page for more information about the calendar, and the Tasks page for more information about tasks.

Sending E-mail

To e-mail users through Blackboard, click Send E-mail under My Institution and select one of your courses to send mail. Note: The selected course needs to be registered with Blackboard. If not, you will get an Access Denied error. Clicking on the selected course will link you to a page with options to E-mail All Users, All Groups, All Teaching Assistants, All Instructors, Selected Users, and Selected Groups. All e-mail messages sent from Blackboard go to the e-mail account specified by each recipient in Personal Information. You cannot check your mail through Blackboard. See the Sending E-mail page for more information about Blackboard's e-mail functionality.

Using the User Directory

To search for people, you can use the User Directory, part of the My Institution Tools. There are two methods for looking up users through Blackboard. The more reliable search method is to search the alphabetical list of users by their last name. Click on this right-hand tab, then click on the first letter of the last name of the person you are looking for. The first page of names will appear. All the names do not fit onto one page, so click through the pages to find the name.

Not all Blackboard users appear in the directory. In order for a person to put themselves into the directory, they must do the following:

• Under My Institution click on Personal Information under Tools.
• Click Set Privacy Options.
• Under User Directory Status, check the box next to Make information available to public.
• Under Contact Information choose the items you want displayed in the directory.
• Click Submit.

If you are sure a user is in the directory, you can search in the Search tab. You can search by name or email address, but be sure that the appropriate button is checked. If the user is in the directory, their name along with whatever information they have specified to show will appear.

My Courses

Your professors must “enroll” you in the Blackboard version of all your classes. If your professor tells you that the class will be using Blackboard but you don't see the class listed under My Institution, then s/he may have forgotten to mark the site as “available” or to add some of the students to the site. Contact your instructor about this. On the other hand, your professor might not be using Blackboard for the class. In this case, you will not have a course site listed for that class. Again, check with your professor if you are unsure about whether a class should have a Blackboard site. If you log in and see course sites from last semester, inform your professor that the site is still visible. S/he can then mark it as unavailable to students or can remove last semester's students.

Digital Dropbox

The Digital Drop Box enables instructors and students to exchange files. Users can send and receive files of any type, including web pages, Word or WordPerfect files, text files, PDFs, etc. Students can send files, like homework assignments, to their instructors. Instructors can view the files and return them to students. Ordinarily, students will send files only to their professors. However, they may need to share files with each other. In this case, however, they can only share files with individuals in the same course workgroup.

Sending & Receiving Files

1. Enter the site for a particular course.
2. Click on the Tools button in the course toolbar. Click on Digital Drop Box .
3. You will see the Add File and Send File buttons and list of Current Files .
4. To view a file in the Drop Box, click on the link name. The file should open in the appropriate application (e.g., Microsoft Word, NotePad).
5. To save a file, hold down the <shift> key and click on the link. You will be prompted to save or open the file; decide on a location to save the file on your computer.
6. To send a file, click Send File . You may only send files to your instructor.
7. Choose the file you want to send from the menu of your posted files or click on Browse... and search your computer for a new file.
8. Type in a name that will be used to create a link to the file, e.g., Homework 2/29.
9. Click Submit .
10. At the top of the Drop Box window you will see a confirmation message that the file was sent. A copy of the file sent to your professor will also appear in your dropbox. If you work on several different computers, you might want to be able to use the same files on the different computers. Consider posting the files to your Drop Box. To post a file to your own Drop Box, click Add File and enter a name and comment and Browse for the file to upload. Looking at your list of Drop Box files, you can see the name of the file, the name of the link to retrieve the file, the size of the file, and the file's status (received or delivered).

Deleting Files from the Drop Box

1. To delete files from your Drop Box, click on the Remove button next to the file(s) you want to delete.
2. You will be prompted to confirm the deletion.
3. Click OK and the deleted files will no longer appear.

Sharing files with other students

The Groups pages File Exchange works just like the Student Drop Box; student group members can send each other files; to see what files other members have sent you, look in the Drop Box on your Group Page.

1. Click on the Groups button or click on the Communications button and then choose Group Pages . You will see all of the groups that exist for the course, with the name of the group as a link, and a description of the group.
2. Click on the name of a Group to which you belong. Only groups to which you belong will have links.
3. When you enter the group page, the Tools available to the group will be listed at the top of the screen. The names of the members and their e-mail addresses will appear toward the bottom of the screen.

Assignment Manager

The Assignment Manager is an alternate method of submitting assignments. Your instructor may have posted an Assignment within a course content area; this means that they expect you to submit something in response to a question or directive. Once an instructor has graded your Assignment they will give you a score; they may also add comments or upload a file in response to your submission. To view the final score as well as any comments or files, go to Course Tools, and then choose My Grades. Click the title of the Assignment, and your feedback will appear.

Important Note: Blackboard uses the term "Assignment" to specifically refer only to this kind of course content item.

To submit an Assignment:

1. Click on the course content area in which the Assignment resides.
2. Choose the appropriate Assignment from the content listed within.
3. Read any directives from the instructor and generate a response file. Responses to this type of item are not restricted in terms of what file format must be used; checking that the instructor has the ability to read the response file is a good idea before submitting less-commonly used file types.
4. Add any comments to the instructor into the Comments field; click Browse and select the location of your response file
5. Choose to either Save or Cancel your work in progress, or click Submit to upload your finished product. Your instructor can only see submitted items; make sure that you Submit the response when you are ready for the Assignment to be graded..

Once your instructor has finished grading your Assignment, you may obtain your feeeback through the Blackboard Gradebook. To receive feedback on your Assignment:

1. Choose Course Tools from the side menu.
2. Click My Grades.
3. Click on the name of the Assignment you wish feedback from.

Discussion Boards

Discussion Boards provide a way of exchanging information and discussing course materials in a format which allows the archiving of old messages, searching, and threading. When a professor sets up a discussion board for a class, you can find it by going to the Blackboard site for that class and, usually, clicking on the Communication or Discussion Board button. If you have trouble finding a discussion board, ask your professor where it is. From the Discussion Board menu, you will see a list of available discussions, called forums. (Many classes will only have one board; others will have several.) The forum list will tell you how many messages there are in the forum and if you have read them all. Click on the name of the forum in which you want to participate. The information on the screen is organized under several headers: the message topic, the sender, and the date the message was posted. Click on the subject line to read the message. Click on the sender's name to send that person an e-mail message. Sort messages by date, author, or subject by clicking on the arrow beside Sort By: below the messages.

In the upper-right corner of the window is a tab labeled Show Options or Hide Options . Use this to display a number of functions for organizing and keeping track of the messages: Select all, Unselect all, Invert, Mark Read, Mark Unread, and Collect. Click the Reply button at the bottom of a message to post a response to the discussion board. Click on the author's e-mail address to send that person a personal response via e-mail.

Note: Clicking on the author's address will either launch the browser's e-mail program or your preferred e-mail program if it is running in the background. In the reply/new message window, simply type your response. It can be plain text or it can contain HTML. Depending on how the instructor set up the board, you may be allowed to send an attachment with the message. Scroll down the screen to see the original message to which you are responding. When you are done composing the message, click Preview to read through your message or Submit to post it to the Discussion Board.

Searching for a message or author

When you first enter a Discussion Board, there is a Search button on the right side of the screen. Click Search to look through the message fields for specified keywords or postings by a specific author. The search will generate a list of messages that contain the criteria you specified. Click on the link to read the message in which you are interested.

Archived Messages If the professor has archived older Discussion Board messages, they will no longer show up with the rest of the messages. Instead, they will appear once you click on Click Here for Archives . Then the archived messages, as well as any new messages, will appear together.