Manual Blackboard Grade Center

Having switched to Blackboard 8 our teaching staff is confronted with the new grade book, now renamed to Grade Center. We have written a quick manual (in Dutch) which can be found here.

Some small observations:
- Uses AJAX technology, and works fine on all platforms. We had slow loading on our (rather old) test server, but this is not a problem on our production server.
- Offers a lot of facilities that teachers do not all need and does confuse a little
- Finally teachers can view and grade the grade list by group(s). This does require creating a 'Custom view' first.
- Does not offer a decent calculated final grade on a score of 1 to 10.

Tip for more manuals and instructions

Kelly Sonora was kind enough to send me a link with lots of valuable manuals and instructions for teaching staff using Blackboard. And these are all in English!!

The address of the posting is at:
http://www.smartteaching.org/blog/2008/08/the-ultimate-guide-to-blackboard-100-tips-tutorials/
They certainly have done a great job! I see they are also using the Teams LX building block as a Wiki solution.

Using Blackboard - let's manual together..

Yesterday there was a meeting of the Dutch Blackboard usergroup. Are large number of institutions are preparing on the switch to Bb 7.x. Everybody is wondering how much work it will be to rewrite all their manuals. An initiative has been started to share manuals. Although everybody does have their own procedures (especially login) and their own mix of building blocks, there is a lot of material which should be easy to exchange. I wonder how this will work in practice.