Saturday, May 09, 2009

Blogs in Blackboard

Started to think about next year's teaching and am definitely going to go down the Blog route for one of the assessments in both of my main Modules. I was going to get the students to create a Blog using BLOGGER, however I have now discovered that Blackboard (the University's Virtual Learning Environment) has a Blog tool built in which can easily be configured for each Module. Doing this means that all students enrolled on the Module will automatically be able to add entries to the Module's Blog. They can only see their own entries (together with my comments) but I can choose from a drop down box which student's Blog to view - brilliant! This means that it isn't necessary to navigate to an indivudal student's Blogger address, instead all Blogs will be viewable directly from within the Module Shell within Blackboard.

Images, movies, audio etc. can easily be uploaded too and the Blog can be exported as a standard HTML package for archiving purposes too.

There is also the option to automatically link the Blog to an assessment within the on-line gradebook too. I like it!

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