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so today we're gonna talk about how you can get started with the whole blackboard
grade center and what that looks like
so to get started what i'm going to
is i'm gonna head of over to the control panel and click on full grade center
that's underneath the grade center
marker
so here in the grade center there are a number columns i don't think they're
particularly
useful
uh... because i want a little more real estate so the first thing i want to
get rid of is the user names there's a little double arrow here and select hide columns
hide user name
because i'm really more interested in the students last name and first name
i do the same thing for the student ID
use that double drop down arrow and select hide column
last access tells me the last time a student logged into my course in
blackboard and this might be very useful for you or you might feel that it's not
very useful
in my case i just go ahead and hide it so i have a little more real estate
use that double arrow
and again select the hid column from the bottom of the menu
availability is also a another one of those kind of things it's not
particularly useful think in looking at a course that's got a
face-to-face components and i'm gonna hide that as well now the only columns i should have are my
total column and my weighted total column
and this looks a lot more manageable to get started as i'm thinking about how i
want to organize
my grade center
so before i can really think about what my grade centers will look
like i really have to start with
the layout of my course and what kind of assignments i will have in my course
what i've done is i have a syllabus page here
there's a breakdown of the different items in this case i've got three tests
at ten percent each
two papers each worth twenty percent of the final grade group project worth
twenty percent
and participation in the course is worth ten percent
so what i'll try and go over here
briefly is just how to make all of those things work together in the grade center
what that's gonna look like
uh... as we go to work with the grade center
so the first thing i think about doing
is it's creating some columns for
some of these items
and we'll worry about the waiting after creating the columns
this is an important thing to bear in mind. the first thing i
do here
is i'm going to create some columns and to do that i use this create column button
in this case i make a column for my test i call it test one
so in this description box i can put in information my students can see
i'm gonna change the primary display to be percentage this is what students will see
in their version of the grade center we'll look at that later
in the secondary display i select sore this will only show up to me as the instructor
so i'm gonna go ahead and not worry about the category right here
do need to assign some points though
this case i make it a hundred-points
if i want to use a rubric i could associate a rubric with this and also make sure that it had
a due date
i could also set some options for the statistics of these columns i want the column to be included
in the grade center calculations i want the students to see the statistics
that are associated with this column
so i change this from no to
yes
this will allow students to see the average median uh... scores for this particular item
click submit and now i have a column that here over the right hand
side
now that's great that's really helpful but i need a few more columns so i go ahead
and make a column here quickly i know it's looking like it's going very fast for both test
two and for test three
and setting these up exactly the same way as i did for my test one
so
uh... i'm also gonna go ahead and add in participation here because is also a
column where not worried about
it being associated with an assignment
by the end of this i should have all of my columns inserted
that are going to be grades that i'm going to input myself
so here we go now i have my test one test two test three
i got the participation column and the group project all that's added in here for
me
nice and easy
now one of the things that i notice is if i look at the total grade here
what shows up is the total points possible a running total up there
and it tells me the type of
column this is
and that could be really helpful because that allows me to see what's going on really
with a glance
for this particular total column
so the total column is a calculated column it can only display the sum
of the other columns
which is important to know because i can't actually chance this myself i have to input
information in the other columns
now if i take a look at my syllabus again i've got everything but my
papers included here in my grade center
i wanted to do the papers a little bit differently because i actually want students
to be able to submit
a paper to me through the grade center
so in order to do this click on the assignments tab and you can do this
in any content area i'm gonna create an assessment and i want to create the assignment assessment
and in this case i call this paper one
and in the instructions section you could copy and paste in the text from the
assignment or you can write a more detailed set of instructions
you could include video if you chose to do that
but really its just your description about how to complete that goes in this box
i could also attach a template if i want to i could attach any other kind
of file that would be associated with this assignment
and it would let me browse my computer for that file
now here we go ahead and input the points possible for this assignment
and once i'm all done with this
i also need to make this assignment available
and i can change the number of attempts that students are allowed for this particular
assignment so if i wanted them to submit multiple attempts i could do that
i can limit the availability to make sure it's only available after a particular date
or until a particular day i can track the number of views
i can even set a due date and a due time
uh... and finally i can decide that this is an assignment for students individually or
an assignment for students as a group
when i'm done click the submit button
and now
i've got that paper assignment
now i do the whole thing exactly the way i did for paper one now with paper two
so i'm just going to get this assignment all set up
so now i have both of my assignments set up and when i go back to my full grade center
i'll be able to see that here added to the far right
are the two assignments i just created a paper one paper two
that's handy to know because
just about every time you add a column or an assignment it always goes to the rightmost
column
in the grade center
and that's great organizationally uh... in terms of knowing where something is going to show up
but that's not really very helpful
well i'm trying to think about
organizing my grades in a way that makes sense for me chronologically for the course
so i'm actually going to change that go to manage
and from manage select column organization and this is going to allow
me to change the order
that my columns are showing at
so here it is important to know that up and down correspond to the left and right
the further i move a column up in this particular list
the further to the left it moves similarly if i move it to the right
it moves down
so in order to move it i go ahead and click right there on that little four
pointed handlebar cursor icon business i grab that particular column and
i'm gonna move it up in the list to a place where i want it
so now paper one is the first assignment then students take a test great i'm gonna do the
same thing with the group project
the same thing with the paper project
so now my grade center mirrors more closely the structure of my course
uh... courses chronology
that's gonna make a lot more sense for me as an instructor when i'm going to fill out
the grades and trying to track uh...
are these assignments being completed in the sequence that i've given them in the class
for me personally it's just gonna make a big difference in terms of
how i think about how this information is organized
so once i'm happy with the organization here i click submit
and this will take me back to the full grade center
and here i can see now that my columns have changed their organization
to more closely reflect
what it is that it is the chronology of my course and assignments
so now that my columns are organized i'm ready to really set the weighting for
my assignments
and to do that i'm going to work with the weighted total column
now my columns are already set up so i just have to tell the weighted column how it works
so click on edit column information
so in column information what i want to do is give it a
descriptions so students know what this column is all about really cause that is i
think helpful for students to understand why they have multiple columns in their grade center
i leave the primary displays percentage and leave the secondary
display as none
now i've got a few different things that are happening down here i've got two columns one
one section is called columns to select one section called categories to select
i'm gonna make categories to select go away for right now
just gonna hide that
so what i need to do is move the columns from the left hand side into
this larger box here on the righthand side and to do that
click right on the column that i want to move
in this box where it says columns to select
then after i've selected an item
i'm going to click
right on this little arrow that will move it over in the middle so that's my
step two
and finally what i've moved the column over now i need to associate the percentage
or the weight for this particular column to the final grade
so in this case my tests are worth ten percent so i input ten
percent here
so now all i need to do is move over the rest of my
assignments
and associate weights with them
and the the grade center is gonna keep a running total for me down here at the bottom so i
can see what's going on
so i go ahead and move over
the rest of these items and in my case i move them over in the same
chronology that
i have organized
in the great center and that's just for me personally in terms of organziation
so here i've sped up
all of my column business so we can see that got a hundred percent total weight
i've added all of my columns and you'll notice that they have disappeared from the list
as i've added them to the selected column section
and it looks like everything is balance the way that i want to be balance
now i can scroll down here
i want this to be calculated as a running total and in
most cases you want it calculated as a running total
i want this column included in grade center calculations i want students to be able
to see this column
right now i don't want students to see the statistics that area associate with this column
i click submit
this'll take me back to my full grade center and now my weighted column is all set up
it's not displaying anything right now because i haven't entered any grades yet
so what's it gonna look like when i start to enter grades
if i enter some information here
lets say the student got a 90 on his first test
the next got an eighty five
our final student in the class didn't do so well
and he got a sixty-four i'm just gonna plunk some grades in here really fast so we can
see how the columns are being calculated what's going on here
uh... because i think that will help to see
what it is that the grade center is actually up to
if i look over here is see i have a total column and a weighted total column
the total column is just a sum
of all of my columns added together
you might feel like this is not a particularly useful column
if your grade is based on weight
if that's the case you are certainly welcome to hide this column and hide
this column from the students as well
or even delete this column if it's not important to you
you'll notice that in the weighted total
that's where i'm actually seeing a reflection of what the students current
grade is in the class
given the weight of the assignments that i entered just a few moments ago
i also have a few assignments that are still blank you'll see that paper one is still blank
paper two over on the right hand side is blank as well
so before we move i go ahead and fill in all the rest of the grades
just so that we can have a sense of what it is
just so we can see how the great center is actually doing all these calculations
that we're interested in
so meanwhile what is it that my students are seeing in the course
all my students are seeing this display of information so they're seeing
a whole list of the grades that are available in the course
we can see where the statistics have been turned out so you can see what students
could see in terms of average and median
if i had given the students some comments the comments would appear over on the right hand side
this is lots of interesting information here for me as a student
i can see the last time i was active in the course last time instructor was active
in the course
i can also see where there are grades that have have not yet been completed
so now to
take care of these assignments that have not been completed i will go through what it
looks like for the students when they submit a paper assignment so here in the
assignment section i click right on paper one i'm a student now
and here as a student i can enter
all the materials that you've requested from me i can see that there is the name
of the assignment in instructions
i can copy and paste in the text right here in this box
or
uh... i could also use the little button down here to submit a file
uh... that i browse for on my computer so i can actually find a text file that i want to
submit
and attach that
i can also
associate some comments in here as a student
and this is an opportunity for the student to give you some information about
their paper that they're submitting
when i click the submit button as a student i can see that i've submitted the
assignment there's submission field there are the comments there is the file that i
attached
i can see that it still needs to be graded
if i'm in the grade center i can see this little green exclamation point that indicates
that it hasn't been graded yet
as instructor when i go to the grade center
i see that same green exclamation point
to grade the assignment i click on the double arrow and select attempt number one
and here i am able to see everything the student submitted here i can see the attached file
i can open that in another window if i want read the whole paper
i can grade the assignment here so i can fill in a grade for the
paper assignment
i can also provide the student with feedback here in this box
uh... and this will go actually directly to the student when they log into the grade center
so once i've done all that
i can also make some notes to myself if that's important some notes i don't want the students to see that are just for
me
when i'm all finished i click on the submit button at the bottom
now for me as the instructor i can see that the assignment is now graded
i can see how that impacted the weighted total for the student
and everything looks great
what does that look like
for the students
well in this case
uh... if we switch here back to student view we can take a look at what that
looks like
on the student side of the grade center they see that their assignment has been
graded this it's ninety shows up that they received for the assignment
and they see
all the comments that you sent
so in a nutshell that's how you set up the grade center from beginning to end
there are a lot of variations in the middle but this is really the basics in terms of thinking
about
creating columns and assignments that are associated with columns
in the great center and finally really setting up the weighted column
in the grade center as well as understanding what it's going to look like for you as an
instructor as well as for students
hope this helps