Attendance Tool in Brightspace?

August 31, 2022BrightspaceDiana Voss

Some Instructors are asking about the Brightspace Attendance Tool.

After exploring this tool, I have constructed the following If…Then statements:

If attendance is part of your grading criteria, Then do not use this tool. Instead post attendance in the Grades area so it’s part of the automatic calculation. Mine looks like this:

Interested in learning more about Grades in Brightspace? Check out DoIT Training’s Minibyte slideshow/videos

If you aren’t concerned about incorporating it into grades, then read on!

Brightspace Attendance

The attendance is a tool that you will find in Course Admin

Directions on how to set it up can be found here.

I could not find any directions on how the students can view it but I did figure out that you can add it to your Nav bar. if you want the students to see the available Attendance data.

Note that this tool will work fine without the students having access to view it. The students do not check themselves into class, this is a manual process that the instructor must enter, one by one. (This is a large reason why simply using the Grades area and marking off any absences may be less time consuming.)

This shows the pull down process for marking each learner present or absent:

It is easy to see how a long class roster would be a burden.

… and If you choose to enter this into the Course Nav Bar, this is what a student sees:

While it does not connect to the grade center, you can export the information out if you would like into a csv file.

The file looks like this:

Brightspace: e-mail the whole class

August 23, 2022UncategorizedJennifer Adams

So, in my last post, I showed how users can opt in and out of notifications. In this post we get around students being able to opt out of announcement notifications and also help keep your course site a little cleaner.

As opposed to sending an Announcement, you can email the whole class by going to “Course Admin” in the NavBar -> Learner Management section and click on “Classlist”.

Then select from the top “Email Classlist”

Click on “Send Email”

and compose your email to the whole class here. Click “Send”.

originally published: https://wp.me/p4md28-nx

Brightspace Notifications

August 23, 2022UncategorizedJennifer Adams

How to setup your alerts and register your mobile device on Brightspace:

Find Notifications under the location where it says your name.

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Under Contact Methods:

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Set your SMS and eMail notifications:

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When you have everything setup, click Save at the bottom left corner of the page.

Remember to check your email inside of Brightspace. You can see that by clicking on the icon that looks like an envelope.

originally published: https://wp.me/p4md28-nn

Brightspace e-mail

August 23, 2022UncategorizedJennifer Adams

Brightspace has its own email and it can push notifications out to our stonybrook.edu e-mail.

It is important that students, faculty and staff understand that using the inbox inside of Brightspace is important.

It is found by clicking on the envelope icon.

originally published: https://wp.me/p4md28-nj

IT support for Fall 2022 instructors

August 11, 2022Academic Technologies, Blackboard, Brightspace, Lecture Capturing, Respondus, Technical SupportDiana Voss

This morning an email was sent to all Fall 2022 West Campus, HSC and Southampton Instructors. To view it online , click here

3rd Party Tools being added to Brightspace

August 4, 2022Academic Technologies, BrightspaceDiana Voss

Thank you to all who have reached out asking about 3rd party tools

The following list will be updated as more tools become available in the system.

Tools that are working:

Echo360
Lumen
McGraw Hill Connect
Respondus
Turn It In (this is the replacement for SafeAssign in Blackboard)
VoiceThread
Wiley
Zoom

Tools that are still being configured:

Ally
Cengage
Digital Desk
Jones & Bartlett Learning
Macmillan Learning
MindLinks
MyLab & Mastering
Vital Source
W.W. Norton & Company

KB articles for tools that are in production are available on the Brightspace service page : https://brightspace.stonybrook.edu

Brightspace has arrived!

This blog has been “quiet” for some time but now, thanks to Brightspace & the return to campus, it seems the perfect time to re-ignite it!

In case you haven’t heard .. Brightspace has arrived!

Later this week, I will post a video highlighting some of my favorite tools that I tried this Spring, which include: Quick Eval, Course Progress, Checklists and Intelligent Agents.

Once you add the pieces (that you already have from your Blackboard course) :

The built in tools mentioned above will work for you with minimal effort on your part.

To see what I’m talking about, view Brightspace – Start with the _pieces .. Video coming soon!

Stay tuned….

Diana Voss
Director of Academic Technology Services

Workshops!

March 22, 2022UncategorizedJennifer Adams

Have you been to any of our workshops?

With subjects including:

Resume Building and Establishing Your Online Presence
Intro to Git/Github
Figma for Web Design
HTML
Beginner Python with PyCharm
The Basics of Excel
Canva: Promote your Digital Marketing Skills like a Pro
Introduction to Qualtrics
Frugal with Google: Using Spreadsheets for Budgeting

Not only do these workshops focus on subjects that students want to learn about, but they are also offered at the times we have found to be most popular for students, including weekends and evenings!

All Those Test Options in Blackboard & How to Give a Synchronous Test*

April 14, 2020Uncategorizedblackboard, display until, force completion, set timer, synchronous, testsJennifer Adams

This blog entry is going to focus on the options in Blackboard that have to do with the timing of an test.

When you are first creating the Test.. these options are found under the Test Information area and span a few sections. If you have already made the test you can find these options by clicking the chevron next to the test name and clicking “Edit the Test Options”.

Force Completion

When you set this option, if the student looses the connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be unable to go back and finish the test. (Without you having to intervene anyway.) We don’t recommend enabling this setting.

Set Timer

This option gives the student a visible countdown timer during the test. It begins after the test description and instructions have been displayed. If Auto-Submit is selected, at the end of the count down, it ends the test, no matter where they were. If Auto-Submit is not checked, you will see an exclamation point in the grade center and have the option to adjust the grade, if they went long.

If the Force Completion is not set, and a student looses their connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be able to continue taking the test, and the timer will continue from when it initially started. (eg., If they loose the connection for 10 minutes, they loose that 10 minutes.)

Display After and Until

A better way of handling whether students can see the test, rather than the “Make the Link Available” option. Also consider, they can’t start what they cannot see. *So if you want everyone to be done by 1pm and you have a 30 minute timer with auto-submit enabled, consider Display Until to end around 12:30.

Due Date

Due dates (and times) do not affect the test availability (unless you choose the Do not allow students to start the Test if the due date has passed option), but rather provide a flag on the test if it was started or ended after the due date/time.

Test Availability Exceptions

This section allows you to make test rule exceptions for people that need accommodations, or have other needs depending on language or technology situations.

If these settings exist for a test or survey, you can create these exceptions:

Number of attempts
Timer
Availability: Date and time the test is available to the student or group
Force completion
Restrict location

Have any interesting testing stories to tell? What other testing options do you have questions about? Please comment below!

New Live Streaming Attendance Feature

February 27, 2020UncategorizedJennifer Adams

This new feature is available for those instructors who have live streaming turned on inside of Echo360. It will show, as seen below, who is logged into the live stream, as well as log this information (and the total connection time) for your use in calculating attendance.

If this feature makes a difference in your decision on whether you want to turn on live streaming, please contact us at tlt_its@stonybrook.edu to make any changes to your capture schedule.