Engaging Students in your Blackboard Course

I spent Friday at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, attending a one-day conference sponsored by Blackboard. The morning general session included some sneak peeks at planned developments for Blackboard Learn, including a "Student Preview" mode and a greatly improved Grade Center. But the session I thought was most interesting was presented by Stacey Campo of Poway Unified School District. Stacey is a Technology Integration Specialist in PUSD; one of her responsibilities is to support teachers in their use of Blackboard. Poway has been using Blackboard for more than a dozen years, so they have had a good amount of time to develop some best practices.

The topic of Stacey's presentation was "Engaging Students", focusing on how to create a worthwhile Blackboard course that students will want to continue using.  The three key components are engaging design, engaging content, and engaging interactions.

Engaging Design:

• Include a course banner and/or a welcome image on your course entry point. You can use Cool Text, PicMonkey, and Icon Archive to create an appealing image that makes it obvious to students which class they are looking at. (Here is a screencast I put together to show you how to change the course entry point.)
• Modify the navigation buttons on the main menu to make it easy for students to find what they are looking for. Keep the menu short, and use dividers to organize it into sections. (Here is a screencast showing how to edit the main menu.)
• Make sure things are updated regularly, so students want to return to see what's new. You could do this with announcements, or with a "This Day in History (/Science/Math/Art, etc.)", or a Quote of the Day. Here's a collection of "This Day" links; here's a quote-of-the-day resource.

Engaging Content:

• Using the improved Calendar in Blackboard can help shift the ownership of learning from teacher to student. You can add animated cartoons with tellagami.com; you can include quick screencast recordings with Screencast-o-Matic; best of all, you can have your students create these videos themselves and they can post them in a wiki page in your Blackboard class. Also, you can post exemplars of student work in Blackboard just as you would in your physical classroom.

Engaging Interaction:

• Don't neglect the collaboration tools (Discussions, Blogs, Wikis, and Journals) within Blackboard allow students to activate prior knowledge as well as process new information. They can also use Blackboard in conjunction with their Google Drive or Sites accounts to create a portfolio of their work. (By the way, one of the planned upgrades for Blackboard itself is to include a "Portfolio" assignment type, to make this even easier.)
• How do I know which collaboration tool is the one I want? Start with this chart: