Profiles:
You will usually complete a profile for a first week discussion forum. By sharing your profile you introduce yourself to your instructor and class mates, which helps to develop a sense of community. You can expect a profile and welcome forum in most classes during the first week of the semester. Your instructor will tell you where to find the template (often in the Course Documents section of Blackboard), created as a Microsoft Word document.
To personalize your profile, you can insert a photo of yourself, a loved one (including pets), or a favorite place at the top of the template (replace the generic Marian the Librarian drawing). If you have no digital photos or graphics of your own try searching the Internet for free photos, such as the education collection at FreeFoto.com (to copy an image to a PC right click the image and select save; on a Mac, if you do not have a two-button mouse hold down the apple key while clicking). For a brief demonstration of inserting and editing images, view our video tutorial, at:
http://libweb.mansfield.edu/media/tutorial/Images.html
If you do not already have image editing software (e.g. Microsoft Photo Editor, Office Picture Manager, or iPhoto), you may wish to download Photofiltre, a free graphics editing program for the PC:
http://photofiltre.free.fr/utils/pf-setup-en.exe
For a powerful cross-platform program (available for Mac, PC and Linux users), try the Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/). Though a bit overwhelming, this free download is very feature-rich.
As yet another option, try one of several free web applications. The best are Picasa (technically a program to organize pictures, though with some editing features), Picnik and Pixenate. If interested, I have a brief tutorial on basic editing in Pixenate (formerly PXN8). Also see our demonstration of inserting and editing images, at:
http://libweb.mansfield.edu/media/tutorial/images.html
More on Downloading
If you are a returning student and have no problems with downloading documents, feel free to continue to the next page. Otherwise, review and practice the two basic methods of file retrieval:
Click the document link to open it in your web browser, then save
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Save the file locally and open it manually in the appropriate software program (in this case, Microsoft Word). See Figure 7 below for an illustration of the file open/save options.
Figure 7: Open / Save Option
Quite often you will need to retrieve a file or document from the course to your computer. There are several ways to download files, and often the best method depends on your particular computer and operating system.
In most cases, clicking a link to a document (see Figure 7 above) results in one of two results: either you will be prompted to save the file to your computer or external storage device, or the file will open in your browser. If you intend to edit the file, for example a form or template in Microsoft Word, you should save the file first, since you can not edit and save documents directly to the server.
Even if a document displays in your web browser, you still need the actual program used to create it. In reality, the program (e.g. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.) is running in the background to display the document. By themselves, web browser can not display content, other than plain text and images, without plugins or other software applications running in the background.
If a specialized document can not display in your browser, check that you have the program needed to view files saved in its proprietary format, and that the file contains a proper name extension (e.g. .doc for Word, .ppt for PowerPoint, etc.).
Important Note: Saving Files in a Web Browser
If you open Microsoft Office files within your web browser (vs. saving and opening within the program itself, such as Word), you should save and print using the toolbar provided for that application, NOT the web browser's own save and print icons. This will assure that the file is handled normally for that type of document, and not as a web page.
Blackboard, however, has a strange quirk for some people when opening Microsoft Office files on a PC. This should not be a problem for Mac users, since current releases of the Mac OS generally download and open documents in the full version of the appropriate program.
When opening files within a PC web browser, if you find a very basic toolbar, displaying only the Reviewing tools (i.e. no icons for save, print, etc.) then the more essential and useful Standard toolbar is turned off. This toolbar can be turned on by you.
To display the Standard toolbar, or any other for that matter, right click on an empty part of the toolbar and enable it by clicking next to the name of the toolbar on the list of available toolbars. See Figure 8 for an example, using Word as an illustration.
Figure 8: Selecting a Toolbar in Microsoft Word
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