Who Are All Those Extra People in My Blackboard List?

You may find students in your class list with a ‘stop’ sign in front of their name.  Like this:

This is a students who – at some point in the registration process – added then dropped your class. You don’t know why and, really, you don’t care. They are no longer part of your class.

But there’s a bunch of names with this and they clutter your class list.

In the Grade Center, look for the “Manage” button across the top. Click on it and select “Row Visibility”

In that menu, select all the students who have the stop sign in front of their name. Don’t worry, you can get them back if you need to!

Click “Hide Rows” when you’ve selected the affected students.

Click Submit and – voila! – they are gone from your class list.

Questions? Contact Mary Jane at mjheider@genesee.edu

Sending Email to your Class

Blackboard is cool to use for email… nothing to set up, nothing to have installed on your home computer. And — best of all — the email comes from your Genesee email address! No getting your personal and Genesee email addresses confused and sending to students from the wrong address.

You do not have to be using Blackboard for your course, and your course does not even have to be available to students to use this tool.

First of all, we need to set up the Email tool. It’s not there automagically! 😦

Click on the “+” sign in the upper left corner of the course. Select “Tool Link”

In the menu, you need to type “Email” in the first line (so you know what it is!) and then select “Email” from the drop down list.

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE MENU, you’ll end up with a link that says email. The square with a line through it says it’s not available — but that’s not available to students. You still can use it. Click on the word Email.

To send a message to your entire class, simply choose the first option — All Users. That sends a message to all currently enrolled student. It does NOT send a message to students who have dropped the class.

Sending the actual message becomes pretty simple from there. (Clickee to embiggen!)

When you click send, it goes from your Genesee email to all the members of your class.

You can send to individual students also. On the “Send Email” page, just select “Single/Select Users” further down the list.

Questions? Contact Mary Jane at mjheider@genesee.edu!

Making a Class List from Blackboard

You don’t need to be using Blackboard for any of your course materials and your course does not even need to be open to students for you to do this!

In your class, go to the the Control Panel and then Full Grade Center.

In the full Grade Center look to the far right of the window and find the “Work Offline” button… Click on it and select “Download”

Once in the download window, you have options and if you’re just looking for a class list, select “User Information Only” — for anyone that uses the Blackboard Grade Center, the “Full Grade Center” option will give you a file with your grades that you can turn in to your department at the end of the semester!

Leave all the rest of the defaults as is. Press Submit.

You get a “download” option. Click the box.

This will give you an Excel spreadsheet. (clikee to embiggen!)

If you’re going to use the file, you need to do a File > Save As > and save the file in Excel format! Otherwise, you get an ugly text format that isn’t pretty to work with! Mire clickee-ing for embiggen-ing!)

There you go! A class list for you to work with!

Questions? Contact Mary Jane at mjheider@genesee.edu

Calling the Help Desk with Blackboard problems/questions…

In a word: Don’t.

The problem is, the folk on the help desk phone number don’t  know anything about Blackboard (or Genesis) and don’t have access to even try to help. So questions beyond “is it up and running” or “I need help with a password” – they can’t help at all.

What happens is the person you talk to on the phone takes your message and, well, it comes to us. So Harold and Bob and I end up with your question in the end.

You’ll get better, and faster, service if you send your questions / concerns / problems to helpdesk@genesee.edu

Now, I love you all, but don’t just send all your problems to me… I do (occasionally! Shhhhhh…) take a day off, and while I try to be good about turning on my out-of-office message, there’s no guarantee that I’ll always remember. But there’s always someone watching the helpdesk@genesee.edu email (well, working hours and spot checking on the weekends) so that you’ll get someone to respond appropriately…

And, while I’m at it, sending your students to the Help Desk phone number with Blackboard questions does essentially the same thing. The folk on the phone can’t do much besides validate things look to be running and, again, take a message. That Harold, Bob and I get. Tell your students to write to helpdesk@genesee.edu when they run into non-password Blackboard problems.

Meep! Classes start in 5 days! Stay warm in the meantime!

Questions? You know where I live!

–Mary Jane

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This post was an email sent to faculty on January 7, 2015