It’s the beginning of the Semester (OK, so it’s not right now, but let’s pretend that it is). You’ve got a brand new Blackboard site set up for your brand-new paper, and you’ve logged in to start working on it. It’s staring straight back at you in that default shade of blue, with those default menu items, and despite attending the three-hour preparation training course, you’re stuck. How do you make your site unique?
Apart from knocking on one or two of your colleagues’ doors and asking to have a look at their Blackboard sites, it can be difficult to get some ideas about how to set out your own. To address this, we’ve asked some lecturers to share screen-shots of their Blackboard pages, which you can view on the Blackboard Help Site.
To start off with, we’ve concentrated on the look and feel, so the examples illustrate how you can use banners and change the course menu and colour scheme to suit your paper. The descriptions underneath the screenshots include links to instructions for that particular task (for example: how to upload a course banner, or remove items from your menu).
From the examples we have so far, here are the top five tips for customising the look and feel of your Blackboard site:
- Change your course menu to suit your paper – not vice versa!
- Try both buttons and text for your course menu before deciding which one works best with your content
- Have a look at your Departmental website to see if you can tie your colour scheme and/or banner in with your Department’s look & feel
- Try the University’s image database to source images for course banners
- Use Announcements to highlight (and link to) new content in your paper.
If you’d like to share your Blackboard site, we’d love to hear from you!
