Learn more about the built-in Blackboard tools available for communicating with your students. There are also several learning tool integrations (LTI) available for communicating with students and building community. Please reach out to Academic Computing with any questions.

Notifications

To get the most out of Blackboard Ultra Course View's communication tools, we recommend you start by setting up your notifications for course activity based on your preferences.

1. Log in to Blackboard

2. Select Your Profile (Your Name) on the base navigation menu

3. Under System Settings, select any of the links in the section Global Notification Settings. This will open the Notification Settings layer which you can toggle between each option.

4. Select each tab to open Stream Notifications, Email Notifications, SMS Notifications, and Push Notifications, and select the notifications you want to receive as well as the timing of each.

Types of Notifications

• Stream: Choose which activities appear on your Activity Stream page.

• Email: If you want to receive email notifications, add an email address to your profile page. Then, choose how often and which activities you want to receive notifications for.

• SMS: If you want to receive SMS text messages on your mobile phone, add a phone number to your profile page. Then, choose how often and which activities you want to receive notifications for.

• Push notifications: If you want to receive push notifications, choose how often and which activities you want to receive notifications for. Messages pop up on your mobile device if  you have the Blackboard Learn mobile app installed. Note: You must also enable Notifications for the app through your phone's system settings.

Announcements

Announcements are an ideal way to post time-sensitive information critical to course success. Add announcements for these types of course activities:

• Due dates for assignments and projects

• Changes to your syllabus

• Corrections/clarifications of materials

• Exam schedules

From Blackboard Support:

New, active course announcements appear the first time students enter your course. Students need to close the New Course Announcements window before they can view course content. After students close the window, it won’t appear again. If you post new announcements, the window appears again with only the new announcements.

Open

1. Open the course

2. Look for the Announcements tab and select Create Announcement
   

3. Type a Title, which appears at the top of the announcement pop-up.

4. Select Recipients (if you use groups, you may choose to send an announcement only to specific groups. All course members are selected by default)

5. Type your message.

6. Select Send an email copy to recipients to send an email of the announcement to anyone in the recipients list.

7. Select Schedule Announcement if you are posting this before the day and time you want students to see this announcement or if you want the announcement to be hidden after a certain date.

   Open

   

8. Select Save.

Messages

The messages tool allows you to send emails to other people in your course without launching a separate email program and having to look up the student emails. You can send email to individual users, the entire class, or to groups of users.

1. Open the Messages page from the course navigation.

2. Select the New Message button  in the right corner.

3. Select the recipients for your message.

4. Select the Allow replies to the message to allow other users to respond to your message from within Blackboard.

5. Type your message.

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