In our last blog post, we reviewed the helpful functions and time-saving features of the Blackboard Homepage Courses view. Today, we’ll look at the valuable (yet underutilized) Calendar tool. While not a new concept to Blackboard, the recent UBN upgrade situates the Calendar more prominently on the homepage, and improved tool capabilities have better-positioned students for success in your courses. Read on to learn how the enhanced Calendar can help our students meet assignment due dates, take advantage of all that your course shell has to offer, and more.
Are you tired of missed deadlines and extension requests? With all the different course types that our students take nowadays, it is not uncommon for them to experience varying course start/end dates and overlapping deadlines. With these competing demands for student time and attention, overlooking a due date is easy to do. The availability of the Calendar tool on the Blackboard Homepage (along with the Activity Stream, another Bb Hidden Gem) can help students hold themselves accountable for participating in upcoming events, meeting due dates, and planning for other deadlines.
But first, the key to ensuring your students stay informed is by configuring due dates for graded activities and tasks. Once due dates are built into materials within your Blackboard shell, various calendar settings, sharing, sorting, and display preferences can help students identify and keep track of that upcoming work.
The Calendar offers multiple view options: schedule vs. due dates and day vs. month. The schedule view allows one to see all events associated with a course, including office hours and course-specific meetings and events. The Due Date view streamlines items displayed so that only assignments configured as graded activities are shown.
Course-specific color-coding helps students easily differentiate between items and tasks for each instructor.
Other events and reminders can be added to the Calendar, to keep everything in one place. All users (students and instructors) can add events to their personal Calendar (by using the + sign in the upper right corner). Instructors can add Events to various calendars (privately on their personal Calendar or for their students through calendars of courses they instruct).
Calendar displays can also be optimized for personal preference. By default, all calendars for courses a user is enrolled in are displayed, but users can select which calendars they want to show using the gear icon in the upper right corner.
The Calendar sharing feature can optimize collaboration and improve planning and more efficient scheduling. Clicking the ellipses to the right of “Calendar Settings” allows users to add or share a calendar.
These are just some of the features of the Blackboard Calendar that support instructor efficiency and student success. For more information about Calendar and other enhanced teaching and learning features from the new Blackboard Homepage check out this video. Next week we’ll showcase another “Hidden Gem,” the Grades tab.
Still have questions or need assistance? Contact us at CIS for more help.
thanks for this! i just added my office hours to the students’ calendar!