Tag Archives: Brightspace

April Fool’s Day Challenge!

Brightspace, Technical Support, ,

April Fool's day - Is this a prank or not?

A few weeks ago,  Martin & Logan (2 of our student techs) asked me if they could write an article for the DoIT website on April Fool’s.  I laughed and shrugged it off.   The suggestion indeed sparked some creativity in our office.   Jokes were made like “we should answer “Joe’s Pizza” when the phone rings and a few other suggestions that, honestly I was concerned might stress those out who needed help so I refused to encourage the idea….UNTIL…

A KB article needed to be fixed and a lot of full time staff were out that day. I turned to one of our student techs and asked them to edit it, and they did so, perfectly.  They were so pleased with, not only the work they had done but that, we (DoIT) trust our students to publish information, that I felt inspired to revisit the “april fool’s article” idea.

I challenged Martin & Login to write a KB article on how to use Brightspace Glossary and promised that if it was well written, they could create a “GenZ glossary” edition for April Fool’s and they accepted & completed the challenge!

Displays how the Glossary tool in Brightspace looks like

To learn more about how to create a glossary AND to learn some “lingo” , take a moment to read our latest article: https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/brightspaces-glossary-tool 

If you have a suggestion for a KB article for our website, please email us at: academictechnologies@stonybrook.edu

Organize Your Course Using Modules

Brightspace, Wednesday Wisdom

 

Students like how course content is organized into modules, making it easier to navigate and understand the progression of the course.

Faculty actively teaching in Brightspace have found that this layout of modules and sub-modules makes it easy for students to navigate the course and find needed materials. (Please note that the Course Overview section cannot be viewed in the Pulse mobile app. It is recommended that if the syllabus is included in the Course Overview area, you also include it in another section.)

EXAMPLE:

COURSE ORIENTATION (module)

  • Syllabus (sub-module)
  • Introductory discussion (sub-module)
  • Links to university resources (sub-module)
  • Required readings (sub-module)

WEEK 1 (module)

  • Week 1 Readings (sub-module)
    • Week 1 Reading 1 (content)
    • Week 1 Reading 2 (content)
    • Week 1 Reading 3 (content)
  • Week 1 Slides (content)
  • Week 1 Assignment

WEEK 2 (module)

  • Week 2 Readings (sub-module)
    • Week 2 Reading 1 (content)
    • Week 2 Reading 2 (content)
    • Week 2 Reading 3 (content)
  • Week 2 Slides (content)
  • Week 2 Quiz

Lets Connect the Dots!

Uncategorized

Happy fall semester!

Be sure to connect your assessments to your grades!

One of the first things instructors should do when setting up a course in Brightspace is set up the Grades. This will make the rest of your course setup a breeze!

 

Create your categories FIRST, then each assessment you add can be designated to a category that you created. Nice and easy!

For more information on how to do so:

https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/setting-up-your-brightspace-grade-book

 

Wednesday Wisdom

Brightspace, Wednesday Wisdom,

Deleting Unwanted Grade Items

As an instructor using Brightspace, keeping a tidy gradebook is essential to ensure grade calculations are accurate and easy to understand for both yourself, and your students. However, achieving this cleanliness sometimes requires a bit of digital housekeeping, especially when it comes to deleting grade items. You may find that the process of deleting some grade items is simple when running into old activities, or duplicate grades that need to be removed. However at times, you may run into a situation where some activities seemingly cannot be deleted. This week, we’ll be focusing on how to remove these pesky grade items that seemingly won’t go away.

The reason some grade items seemingly cannot be removed is because of their association to an assignment, discussion, or quiz. You’ll notice in the Manage Grades tab of the Grades area, certain grade items will have something listed next to them in the Association column. This will usually say Assignments, Discussions, or Quizzes. 

This means that those grade items are associated to either an Assignment, Discussion, or Quiz created in Brightspace, and needs to be disassociated before it can be removed. To learn more about how to disassociate these grade items and how to delete them, check out this article! In addition, we’ll be talking about this and other gradebook topics in our webinar on Common Gradebook Issues and How to Resolve Them on Tuesday, April 16th from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. Click here to register! We hope to see you there!

Wednesday Wisdom

Brightspace, ,
We hope the semester has kicked off to an amazing start! 

Have you been looking to add users to your course? Maybe you have a teaching assistant that you would like to put into Brightspace? Or maybe you’re not sure what type of access to give someone you want to add (IE: TA, Grader, Course Builder)? 

Well you have come to the right place! It is simple to add a user to your course, click here to find out how.