Course Tools
Besides special communication features, Blackboard provides several tools for course management. See Figure 22 for a typical menu. As with other Blackboard menus, your instructor ultimately controls which tools appear, so each course menu may differ from others. Like the Communication tools, Tools are accessible from the menu box under the blue navigation buttons.
By far the most important tool for students is the grade book, called My Grades (see next page for more details). Other useful tools include a Search feature for locating content anywhere in the course and the Digital Dropbox, where you can store personal files or share ("send") files with your instructor. This tool is rarely used but could be useful if you work at both home and school and wish to load a file at one location and retrieve it later from somewhere else.
If you change your name or contact information you may reflect that in the item, Personal Information. Please note, however, that this area is unofficial and a change here will not reflect on your transcripts or any official MU record. If you change your name (e.g. due to marriage) you should contact the Registrar's Office, as described in the Student Handbook.
Figure 22: Course Tools
The Course Map is simply a detailed menu of all course content. If you click on this option in the Tools menu it will open a small window displaying a map of the entire course. You can then click on any link to quickly move to specific parts of the course without navigating several layers of folders and sub-menus. Below is an example of the Course Map from LSC 5530, School Library Advocacy.
Figure 23 Course Map
If You Can Not Open Popup Windows or Tools
If you have trouble opening popup windows, like the Course Map, the cause could be security or popup blocker software. If this is the case you will probably have similar problems with other Blackboard tools or library databases.
You can often fix this by adding the domain (e.g. mansfield.edu) of the affected site in the software's Allowed Site settings. For help on this procedure with popular web browsers see our Help page entry on Browser Security or a cheat sheet from LiveText (one of our vendors). If you still need help with this problem now is the time to Ask Us.
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Blackboard Tutorial Page 11 of 12 |
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