Using Blogs for Student Journals

Setting up your course Blackboard Site for Journals

 Instructor Guidelines

In order for your students to have their own journal within Blackboard, you will have to create the initial journal for them using a product called : Blogs.

Step 1: Log into Blackboard

Once you have successfully logged into Blackboard, find the course (under My Courses) that you would like to add the journals option to.

Open that course

Step 1: Add a “Journal” or "Blog" link to your Course Menu so that the students can access it!

 Click on the Control Panel option, located on the left hand side of your Blackboard site:

Your screen will change at it will look like this:

Click Manage Course Menu under Course Options

• Click Add Content Area:

• Click in the Text box located underneath the drop down menu and type Journals(Or student journals, blogs, whatever you prefer)
• Click Submit
• It will take you back to the screen where you can add items to your menu, scroll down and click OK
• You should now be in your Control Panel and in the top left section of your screen you should see: Journal’s (or whatever you named the new area) listed under Content Areas:

Step 2: Adding your student’s journal sites

*** You will have to create a journal for each student , if you have 25 students you will need to repeat this step 25 times ***

From Your Control Panel, select the Journal section

You will see the following at the Top of your Screen:

Move over to the Select: option on the far Right

Change “Learning Unit” to “Blog” and Press GO

Your Screen will change! Follow the directions on the new screen, below are some “tips” . . .

Section 1: Type the Name of the Student.

Section 2: You will need to select the student whose journal you want to create and press the to move the student name into the Group Members column.

• Don’t forget to click the to move them over!

Section 3: Set your Availability Options

The following information refers to the above image

• Do you want to make the content visible? If the content is not visible , the students assigned to that teams site will not be able to access it and work on their site
• Do you want to allow users to view posts by other users? If you only want the student and yourself to see their journal, click No
• Do you want to allow students to purge blog entries? If you say yes, students can remove entries from their blog
•  Who do you want to allow to comment on blog entries? IF you want to be the only person who can “comment”, choose: Instructor Only
• Choose the dates and times for which group members will be allowed to edit the blog. If you want to prevent the student from editing the site after a certain date, you will need to set that restriction here (Make sure you check off the box)
• Choose the dates and times for which non-group members will be allowed to view the site. To Prevent other students from seeing the journal, you will need to set that restriction here. (Check off the box)
  • If you do not wish for students outside of the group to see the site, you will need to set the Display Until to a date that has passed. (Make sure you check off the box next to Display Until)

Section 4: If you want to add this assignment to your gradebook, you can do so here!

*** It will create a grade book entry for each blog , so if you have 30 students and have created 30 blogs (one for each student), it will add 30 columns to your gradebook ****

Click Save when done! Once you hit Save, it will take you back to the Journal section so that you can continue to add the journals for all of your students

Step 3: Did it work?

 

Back out of your Control Panel and into the main view of your course and click on the Portfolio (blog)link

You should see something similar to this:

Click View

Once you click View, your screen should change and you should see:

 

If you would information for your students on how they can post information to their Journal, please feel free to download this document and modify it appropriately for your course:
Student's guide to using Journals/Blogs