Welcome to Blackboard Training: Discussion Boards Part 2, brought to you by the Center for Innovation at Indiana Wesleyan University. This training will continue on from what was left out of the first. Now that you can understand the use of Discussion boards, and can successfully create your own, the focus will be on using this tool effectively for your course. Written instructions for this training are available at the bottom of your screen. Let’s take a moment to examine the use of course links. At times you may wish to provide students with direct access to a discussion forum without requiring them to leave a particular area of Blackboard (for example, a workshop folder). You can do this by creating a linked discussion. In the workshop folder, select the add interactive tool drop down menu and select discussion board. If you wish to link the student to the discussion board, select that option. If you wish to link them to a specific, or already created, discussion forum, select that forum and click next. If you wish to create a new discussion forum and provide a direct link in the workshop folder, select create new forum. Follow the forum creation process detailed above and select submit. This will return you to the original window. At this point you have already created the new discussion forum. You are now creating the link which will appear in the workshop folder. The new forum is already highlighted, so just select next. The title of the forum is already provided. You may add any instructions you wish students in the workshop folder to see and then set link availability. After doing this, select submit. You have now created a new forum and provided your students a link within the workshop folder. To view a discussion forum, select the forum name to view its contents. When viewing the discussion board you will see that you have two options: tree view and list view. Both formats allow you to read and reply to posts, though each has its own look and feel. Choose which format matches your navigation style. The selected view will be highlighted on your screen. The List View provides a column view of the forum. The columns include: the date and time the posting was made, the thread title, the author, the status, the number of unread postings, and the total postings. Each column is searchable and you can select on the arrow on the title bar of a column to arrange it in ascending or descending order. You will notice that only the initial posting (sometimes called parent) threads are displayed. Your only indication of replies is the number listed under total number of postings. Whenever additional postings are made to the thread, the starter, or parent, thread displays in bold type and the number of unread posts will appear under the unread posts column. To view all the posts in a thread, click on the post title. Under tree view, the parent threads and all associated replies (sometimes called children) are listed. You'll see the plus and minus buttons in front of an individual thread to expand or collapse only that thread. The titles of unread messages will be displayed in bold type. To read a posting, select the title. From the forum screen you can subscribe to a forum by selecting subscribe. As detailed earlier, doing this provides you with an email alert whenever the forum is updated. The grade forum button takes you to the grade forum users screen. Here you will see the name of all discussion participants, any grades previously entered and any students whose postings still require grading. The grade button takes you to the grade forum for that particular student. Here you will see each of their postings listed along with various forum statistics and the edit grade button. The edit grade button lets you enter the points scored for the discussion as well as feedback for the student and grading notes for your own records. Additionally, selecting view rubric will bring up the discussion rubric if previously entered. Returning to the forum screen, we see the create thread button. Selecting this allows you to create a new discussion thread in the forum. We will further examine that feature in a moment. For now, notice that you have three additional small buttons to explore. Thread actions, Collect, and Delete. The delete button does exactly that: deletes a selected post. The collect feature allows you to open any number of discussion postings on the same screen by simply checking the small box beside each title and then selecting collect. The thread actions drop down provides you a number of options with any checked posting. You can mark all checked messages as read or unread. You can flag or unflag messages for follow-up. You can publish a posting if you are using the force moderation feature. You can hide or make unavailable a posting. And you can lock or unlock postings. Now let’s get back to creating a discussion thread. Select create thread. This opens the create thread window which includes three sections: Message, Attachments, and Submit. First, in the message section, type a subject for the thread. After doing this you will type the body of your message in the window provided. If the text editor is turned on (by clicking the button on the upper right side of the message window) you can access many of the functionalities available in Microsoft Word. You also have the ability to embed files, images, video, audio, Flash, and other media into your posting. In the attachment section of this window, you can choose to upload a file with your post. This file will then be available for download in the discussion forum. Following this, you can cancel, save your thread as a draft, or submit. If you choose save, you can find your draft in the forum in which you were working. To continue working on the draft, just click to open it. Use the modify button to make any additions or changes. Then submit. The process for replying to a posting is similar to creating a thread. When viewing a posting, select reply and the reply to post window will open. You’ll notice that it mirrors the create thread window with the exception of the subject line. This is already filled with the title of the post to which you are replying.