Blackboard is a system which allows you to put your course materials on a web page and allows access to these materials only to the students registered in your course.

Blackboard will allow you to email all of your students at once, establish discussion threads where you and your students can continuously post email on a particular subject, or even have real-time discussion with students.

Blackboard allows you to put practice exams on line, to monitor the scores students receive on these exams, limit the number of times an exam may be taken, and to put the students' grades on line, as well. You can also establish groups within your course and allow each to have its own private space to share email and files.

It's a good idea to archive your courses at the end of each semester for your files. You can use the freely available bFree to view these archived courses on your own computer.

Logging on to Blackboard

How to log on to the Bb system and find your courses.

Make your course available to students

Courses are set up initially as unavailable to your students; this shows how to make them available.

Upload a Syllabus or other Document to Bb

How to add a file (Word, Excel, PDF, etc.) to Blackboard.

Customizing Your Course Menu

How to modify the items and their order on your course's main menu.

Create a "SafeAssignment"

How to post an assignment on Blackboard and have the Bb system run the student's Word file through the plagiarism report system called Safe Assign. Safe Assign uses a database of other student work submitted at CUNY and globally. It also checks against thousands of journals and web pages. Other formats are accepted, such as PDF and RTF.

Course Merge Tool

Merging courses into one course.

Course Copy Tool

Copying your course from a previous semester.

Archiving and Exporting Your Courses

Make copies of your courses to be stored on your own computer.

Put a Link to iTunesU in Your Course

Setting Up iTunes for Your Course

Some documents are in pdf format; if necessary, get the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.