APS Observer – Twelve Tips for Reviewers.

I’m not a big fan of using the Blackboard email function to communicate with my students.  One reason is that I don’t use BB enough to keep it open in its own tab, so to send an email I need to log in and then navigate through way to many steps to get the job done.  Another big problem for me is that I cannot easily forward emails I receive in my Outlook account to students currently enrolled in my classes.  There may be a way to do this easily, so please share it if you know.  Periodically throughout the semester I will receive announcements for speakers, jobs, or other opportunities that I want to pass along.  To do this through BB, I typically have to copy and paste the body of the email.  If there is also an attachment, I need to save it to my hard drive and then attach it to a BB email.  Alternatively, I can upload the document to BB, add an internal course link to access it,  and then add this link to an announcement.  Way too much work for something in the “hey, I thought you might find this interesting …” category.

Another problem with BB, is that there does not appear to be any easy way to export a distribution list of your students’ email addresses.  Here is one solution, but I would love to learn a better way:

Open Outlook and BB.  In BB, list the users for a course, copy the table, and paste it into a Word document (if there is more than one page of students, this step needs to be repeated for each page).   Once the information is in the Word document, select all of it and convert the table to text (Table>Convert>Table to text).  Select paragraph as the function to separate items in the table, which will ensure that each email address is on a separate line.  Next, sort the entire document by paragraph.  This makes it easier to complete the next step–deleting everything but the email addresses.  Finally,  copy the remaining list of email addresses.

Now, jump to Outlook and click the New button to create a new distribution list.  In that dialog box, click select users and then paste the list of email addresses to the “add to distribution list” box.  Click OK and the new distribution list is populated with the students’ email addresses.  All that is left is to name the distribution list and save it.

Use the BCC function in Outlook when sending emails to the list to prevent the unwanted circulation of student email addresses.

Posted using ShareThis

Posted using ShareThis

Posted using ShareThis

Click the Add Survey button

Click the button

Click the button

Click the button

Click the Select All button or manually select the check boxes next to the items you want to include

Click the button

Click the button

From the drop-down menu next to Select (on the right side of the screen), choose Survey

Click the button

Click the button

Now your copied/modified survey has been deployed.  You can use the “Edit” view to see the options that will allow you to modify and manage the survey.