Oh, there is a lot of learning all around with taking classes online. I *think* I like Blackboard’s class notebook okay, and that it’ll be a better option for the students than having them work in a shared Google doc on my own Drive. Maybe? They’re used to Blackboard already.
It seems like it’ll organize the collaborative pieces better for them, and it has private notebooks for each student that only I can read, which might be helpful for asynchronous quizzes, etc.
Just sent this to my students:
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Hi, students! We’re going to try out Blackboard OneNote’s class notebook. To get us all used to this new course tool (maybe some of you have used it, but it’s new to me), I’d like you to do the following by class time on Wednesday (before our optional class-time Zoom, which I hope you all got the e-mail invite to):
– go to Blackboard
– go to our course
– go to OneNote class notebook
– open the notebook for our class
– go to the Collaboration Space tab
– open the file named Coronavirus Assignment Responses, Part 1
– if you submitted a public response and would like to link to it, please try adding it to the public section, if I haven’t already
– if you submitted a private response, make sure that I’ve noted its receipt on that page
– review at least one of your classmate’s responses
– type a comment or note on that page (the whole class will be able to read it) and sign it with your name (anything is fine — even just “I typed this – Joe)
Let’s see whether this is a useful way for us to talk to each other asynchronously, discuss readings, etc. If it works, what I’ll likely do is post prompts for some of our discussion, and then give you a few days to respond to those. We’re coming to the end of the reading journals, and I’m hoping that instead of just writing those to me, we can use this to mimic some of the back and forth of a classroom discussion. It might be a little chaotic, but worth a try, I think!
– Mary Anne