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Hello. In this video, I'm going to show you how to work with your menu items, and a new
feature to service pack eight
is "Themes".
Begin by turning your course onto "Edit Mode" in the right hand corner.
See the green dot; you know you are in "Edit Mode".
On my menu items that link to areas in my course,
I am going to... the plus sign shows when you put it in "Edit Mode" and I have a content area
which I'm going to create a button for that shortly.
That's what you're going to use the most.
"Module Page" That's what we have here as the home page.
"Blank Page"
"Tool Link" It's like a template type of program
that Blackboard has created for you such as your "My Grades" area,
your "Discussion Boards',
"Wikis", or "Journals" are all tools. "Web Link" means that you're creating
a button to link to an outside web source.
And "Course Link", of course, creates a link to somewhere within your course. "Subheaders"
and "Dividers" are just visual
items for you. You can see here, I have a divider.
So let me begin by going to the plus, creating a content item,
and I'm going to type
"Mid Term Project" notice
that I've typed this before and it's anticipating it.
You would think that you could click on that and it would put it in there, but there's a little bug or
something, and it doesn't work if you do that. So you need to type that in there.
You also need to say "Available to Users".
Otherwise, it won't show to your students.
Click "Submit".
It will put it right at the bottom.
Go over to you see the two-headed arrow, hold your left mouse down, and you can drag it up to
where ever you want and drop it. And I'm just going to put it right up there above
"Final Project".
Again, notice the link has no content, so it won't show until there is some content in
there.
If I wanted to change the name, I can click on the chevron and say "Rename".
Go in here and put a hyphen
and then click on the green
checkmark, and it changes the name for it.
So, now, I have a content button, and this is what it looks like in a content
area.
You can start building your content, so it has all of your tools in there. And this is
what we used most of the time.
If I want to create a tool link,
I would click on "Tool Link",
and this time let me say "Journal".
And I do have to go down and select it out of this list, so it knows
which template to pull from.
So there's "Journals".
And make it "Available to Users", "Submit",
and again, you can drag it and put it where ever you want... put it underneath "Discussion
Board".
And the journal,
as you can see, is already
a template where I can go ahead and click and create a journal here. Okay.
So that's how easy is to work with those buttons.
Now, let me show you something else on this page, and that is "Themes".
This is new to service pack eight and it looks like kind of a partial color wheel
up here.
There are fifty different colors that you can change to,
and let me just grab "Sunshine" here.
And you can see it's pretty bright. It's kind of neat.
There's also by discipline and since this is a history course,
let me click on the history theme.
And you can see I kind of have some different
different color here; brought up a map underneath.
There's nursing and all sorts of them in there. Again as I said there's fifty.
Okay. So the other thing I want to show you real quickly is
how to change your
buttons to buttons instead of this textual menu.
Go to your control panel, then down to customization,
and the verbage here has changed from the last version of Blackboard. It used to say
styles. Now it says "Teaching Style", so click on that.
And it will again offer you
some of this pedagogy to
try to help you
along with the structure of your course, but we are going to skip that and go right down
to the
menu style. You can see I have textual,
text menu. I'm going to change it to buttons,
and then I'm going to show you the "Button Library".
And the "Button Library" has all kinds of... You can do stripes, patterns,
or solids. Let me just grab that one,
and then I'm going to go ahead and scroll up or down and "Submit".
And you'll notice that I now have buttons on the side.
I would obviously get rid of my divider here because I don't need it in
there since I have
buttons that kind of separate themselves.
And you can see
how neat that is to work with,
so have fun with it. And if you have any questions,
please, feel free to give me a call. Thank you.