Blackboard Blogs

Using Blackboard Sync to Reach Students on Facebook

Looking for a way to use the popular Facebook website in your teaching?

Here’s a brief article (“Teachers use Facebook to reach students”) posted on TheRecord.com, a site operated by The Canadian Press, in which a high school teacher in Halifax explains how he uses Facebook in his teaching.

Want to enable your faculty members to reach their students through Facebook?

Blackboard Sync, an application developed by the Blackboard Beyond initiative and offered as a Blackboard Building Block (download it from Behind the Blackboard), can enable your teachers and instructors to deliver Blackboard course information and updates through the Facebook platform.

University of Manchester's Plans for Its Blackboard Implementation

The University of Manchester, the co-host of BbWorld Europe '08, was featured in an article published this week by Crain's Manchester Business.  The university implemented the Blackboard Learning System and will make its features – including SafeAssign – available to 13,000 students next month, and then plans, over the course of the year, to roll out access to all of its 40,000 students.

The strategic project manager for teaching and learning at U of M, Sarah Morgan, is quoted in the Crain’s article.  While providing reasoning for Manchester’s use of Blackboard software, she cites an interesting fact that exemplifies the seemingly exponential growth of the student population in the UK during the last decades:

“The whole of the UK had as many students in the 1960s as Manchester University has today. That's good but it means we are chock-a-block with students, and it's challenging to meet the needs of so many.

(To view the Blackboard Blogs archives for previous posts about U of M, click here.)

Registration for BbWorld Commerce '09 Opens Soon

FYI: Registration for BbWorld Commerce '09 opens the week of September 15.

This users conference, a premier event for campus commerce and security professionals, is designed exclusively for users of Blackboard products and services, to share ideas with peers, network with industry leaders and learn about the latest innovations directly from Blackboard developers.  The conference will be held at the the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort in Phoenix from February 9 to 11, 2009.  For further initial information, see the newsletter announcement in the August 2008 issue of the Blackboard Commerce Bulletin.

Interested in learning what occurred during the conference last year?  Jay Sternberg posted his view of the activities during the conference.  Tom Bell summarized last year's event nicely in a post-conference post.  And the keynote addresses delivered last year by Mark Milliron (Catalyze Learning) and Adrian Sannier (Arizona State University), which I feel fortunate to have seen in person and recommend highly, can be viewed here.