I will soon be teaching in a private school 7th greade. The school I will be at uses a program to do many things. Attempt to learn this program have been unsuccessful. Those who profess to be expert are not.
Are there websites where I can learn to accomplish things on blackboard? Are there books (like Blackboard for Idiots.)? Please tell me this a program with easy to aquire skills.
As it happens, there is a Blackboard for Dummies book available. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about the program myself, so can’t offer any further insight than that.
There are lots of youtube videos showing how to do things on Blackboard. Just search for your topic, like “creating a test on Blackboard” or “Blackboard grading”. You’ll probably need to add whichever version of Blackboard the school is using, because there are several.
Thanks, I have ordered Blackboard for dummies. It seems as though it is too old to be much help, but we will see. I will check out you tube, thank you for that suggestion.
From a student’s point of view: The community college I went to used this. The site we log into has a tutorial/demo for new students, where we get a walk-through of various procedures, and some little practice tests to take and things to do like that. I found it reasonably easy to use. I don’t know anything about learning to use it from the teacher’s point of view.
I’m pretty sure that Blackboard, as it now exists (and this is assuming that I’m not confusing the program we used with some other) either bought up or was bought up by some other similar company and everybody had to learn to use the new product all over again. ETA: IOW, there’s some chance that any book you buy, if not really current, might be obsolete.
Completely apart from all that, there is room for much debate over the value of using this kind of software program for education. One can argue for or against a program where students are evaluated solely (or even primarily) by a weekly series of multiple-choice tests, with questions taken straight from the test bank that comes with the textbook. (In fact, whether computerized or not, those test banks that come with textbooks are utter abominations.) Also, . . .
Well, I’ll leave it at that. Blackboard worked well for me (as a student) in some ways, and not in some ways, but that’s all getting into Great Debate territory.