Blackboard Tip: Pasting text from Word

Pasting text directly from word document into blackboard creates formatting problems, may make the content unreadable because of the hidden formatting code included when using the copy/paste feature from Word.  We recommend that you use a notepad (PC) and Notepad) or TextEdit (Mac) as a solution to remove html code.  Using Notepad or TextEdit removes the bad html code from text.

Example of html code pasted from word

Following are the steps to avoid  html codes.

Step 1:  In MS Word, select the text and copy

Step 2:  Open Notepad (PC:  Click Start > All Programs> Accessories > Notepad) and paste text. This action will remove text formatting

Step 3:  In Notepad, select text; from the menu select edit copy.

Step 4: Go to the course content area or Discussion Board post in Blackboard and paste the text in.

Step 5. Format your text using Blackboard’s Text Box Editor Tools.

One Day!

On February 15, Arizona Western College Political Science Department hosted a roundtable political discussion titled “Palestinians and Israel: Is conflict inevitable? How about peace?” Speakers included Mizba Abedi, (Ph.D), Ed Schubert, Karl Josef “Murad”Luttinger (Ph.D) and Kyle Hawkey. The round table gave an opportunity to AWC faculty, students and staff to learn more about the sixty years old conflict in the Middle between the Israelis and the Palestinians. With hope in peace, Kyle Hawkey shared a virual slide show from his visit to Israel and Palestinian territories . Enjoy!

Peer Review Through the Discussion Board

Peer Review Through the Discussion Board


Overview From Blackboard:

A common learning tool in classrooms is providing feedback to other Students on their work. Students prepare an essay, lab report, or presentation and share it with the class. Other Students are asked to comment on the work and offer criticisms for improvement. This process helps the Student improve their Assignment, but is even more valuable to the Students that review the work. Reviewing the work of another Student enforces classroom learning and helps the reviewer practice important communication skills and critical thinking.

The Discussion Board is the perfect place in a Course for peer review. Each Student may start a thread and include their work in the initial post. Other Students then review the work, assign a rating to the initial post, and include comments in a response. As users respond, the feedback expands as users reinforce and build on points made by other Students.

Users can respond to a post using a 5-star rating system. To enable this feature, select Allow members to rate posts when creating the Forum.

Rating a Discussion Board Post


Open a thread and view the posts. Each post has an Overall Rating field with five stars. The stars show the overall rating that the post has received from users. Click on the Rate this Post drop down list and select a rating from 0 to 5 stars. The rating is now included in the Overall Rating and the individual rating appears in the Rate this Post field. A user may not rate the same post more than once..



Video: http://www.azwestern.edu/learning_services/instruction/distance_education/faculty_resources/helpdesk/peerreview.html