Attention Blackboard Faculty: Blackboard Users Group Meeting

Calling all interested Blackboard faculty and staff! We will be having our first Blackboard Users Group meeting on Thursday February 12 from 2-3pm in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Building (CHSS) Room C070.

The Blackboard Users Group meetings are great for learning and sharing from/with your colleagues on the front lines who are teaching with Blackboard at Sam Houston State University. The Blackboard Team will be on hand for a brief Q&A session, but this meeting is all about sharing best practices, stumbling blocks and new ideas with each other.

Each meeting (meetings take place every other month) we will do our best to arrange for a guest speaker (one of your colleagues) who can showcase what they are doing with Blackboard here at SHSU. This Month we are honored to announce that our first guest speaker for 2009 will be Dr. Victoria Titterington. Dr. Titterington will be demonstrating what she is doing with multimedia in her CJ 477 Blackboard course.

We are always looking for more guest speakers, so please feel free to share with the Blackboard Team if you are working on something that you think is great! We look forward to seeing you at the Blackboard Users Group meeting on Feb 12th at 2pm in CHSS Room C070.

Blackboard Downtime 1/23 - Server Maintenance

We will be applying security patches to Blackboard's database servers this Friday 1/23 starting at 6pm. Blackboard will be unavailable because of the server maintenance until 9pm central time. The security patches keep Blackboard's database severs protected from malicious attacks. We appreciate your patience.

It's Gonna Take a Little Time

If you are missing courses, changed courses and it's not showing in Blackboard, or recently activated your account and cannot log in - don't fret.

Our systems are experiencing a high volume of traffic with registration and beginning of the semester. As of now, loads are about one day behind so give it a little time.

If it has been longer than that, give the Helpdesk a call.

Not too early for some Bb Spring Cleaning!

Here are some tips to start off the 2009 Spring semester:

• Copy material from old courses into new ones.
  
  
• Archive course material you don't want to lose.
  
  
• Customize your course menu: make it relevant for your course.
  
  
• Resolve to download your grade center weekly to save grade information.
  
  
• Learn how to use a Turnitin Assignment to check for plagiarism within your Blackboard course.
  
  
• Check the Blackboard Blog for the latest Sam Houston Blackboard information.

The Blackboard Team hopes you have a great Spring 2009 semester!