Before the Spring Semester begins, here is an opportunity to learn more about Blackboard and how to use it well in your teaching. Whether you are teaching face-to-face, hybrid, or online courses, Bb provides a wealth of tools for organizing your course and communicating with students.  Faculty members and technology experts will present a variety of approaches that may offer you useful inspiration.

If you are unable to attend Tech Day, you can access the event in real time at this WebEx link that will become active at 9:00 am on Wednesday, Jan 11: https://sju.webex.com/sju/onstage/g.php?MTID=ec39fcbf654b19f1aa21bc6c8f8b11750 (Password: springtech)

8:30-9:00 am Breakfast

9:00 am-Noon Personalizing and Managing the Bb Environment

• Why Blackboard, Why Now?:  Caroline Fuchs, Maura Flannery
  An introduction by two Blackboard-phobes who finally bit the bullet and used Bb for their courses—and why they are glad they did.
• Organizing the Homepage:  eStudio
  What’s on the homepage and how you can customize it to fit your needs and those of your students.
• Designing a Bb Course:  Patrick Flanagan, Caroline Fuchs, Amy Gansell, Belenna Lauto, Rajesh Singh
  Bb can be finessed to support student learning effectively, but also attractively.  Four faculty members discuss their approaches to achieving these goals. 
• ADA Compliance: Kathryn Shaughnessy, Paul Desmarais
  In creating our Bb courses, we have to keep in mind the diversity of our students in terms of disabilities as well as other factors.  This presentation will deal with complying with Standards for Accessible Design within Bb.

12:00-1:00 pm Lunch 

• “Introducing IBM Watson to Students:” Ellen Tufano
  IBM Watson is a developing suite of cognitive technologies for problem solving.  Learn what this means and how it is relevant to our students.

1:00-2:00 pm: Communicating with Students through Blackboard

• Bb Communication Tools: eStudio
  One of the advantages of Bb is that you can easily communicate with students through a variety of channels.  Learn about leveraging Bb email, mobile, and announcements.
• Bb Mobile: Herb Chain
  A faculty member discusses why Bb Mobile is important to student learning.

2:00 pm: Wrap-Up