Products & Services

What does openness and efficiency look like bundled into one? Blackboard continues to find ways to innovate and make users more efficient in their daily tasks. There are various ways we can accomplish this. It may be through the core Blackboard Learn™ platform. Or, it may be through Blackboard Building Blocks™ where we augment the platform and provide clients with a greater choice of instructional tools. And, as we develop, we continue to consider how we can contribute back to not only the education community, but the developer community, as well. We’re excited to announce two important Building Blocks – Bboogle and the Paste from Word Mashup – are now available and certified for the Blackboard Learn platform.

As the U.S. Peace Corps celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, my husband and I were fortunate enough to spend it with our great friend, Sheila, who is now working as the Country Director for the Peace Corps program in Romania. Sheila and I met ten years ago on our flight to Ukraine to serve as Peace Corps Volunteers ourselves. Little did we know we’d be back in the same part of the world a decade later continuing to fulfill the goals of the program John F. Kennedy started half a century ago. For those less familiar with the Peace Corps, it has 3 simple goals: 1. Bringing technical skills to interested countries through volunteer service 2. Promoting a better understanding of Americans in the countries where volunteers serve 3. Promoting a better understanding of other countries and peoples through volunteers

Recently, I had the opportunity to create a few recorded demonstrations for our Collaborate website.  I must be a true Collaborate geek, because I REALLY enjoyed doing it.  It will not come as a surprise to those who know me, but I tend to be a bit long winded.  I like to talk; I can’t help it. So when I was instructed to make these recorded demos 2 – 4 minutes long I knew it would be a challenge.  Luckily, I have incredibly intelligent colleagues who wrote an effective and concise script that helped me get close to the length.  In my first attempt, I simply loaded the PowerPoint file and did the demo from scratch.  Meaning, I turned on the talk button, record button, launched the desktop share, etc. all manually.  That one was 6 minutes.  In my second attempt I just talked faster and did the same thing – it was still 6 minutes!  What?  Are you kidding me? It was not the content that stretched the recording beyond my time limit, as I said the script was built for a perfect 3 minute recording.  Instead, what was eating away at the clock was the process of building the recording and simply looking around the UI to find the various menus and actions.

Last week the K-12 marketing and sales teams delivered an Executive Symposium in partnership with the Cobb County School District, a strategic K-12 client for more than 11 years. The event featured 30+ clients and prospects and more than 30 members of Cobb County’s senior administrative staff. Blackboard organized symposia in the K-12 market have become a successful model for gathering district leaders together for a discussion of top challenges, models for accelerating online learning and how Blackboard’s host of solutions power K-12 educational opportunities. Blackboard officials learned the practical ways school systems use their platform and gathered feedback on what instructional and operational needs will need to be met in the foreseeable future. Representatives and educators engaged students from Allatoona High School Sept. 21, to gain a better understanding of how students perceive and use technology. To read the full recap of the event, please check out this great post on CobbCast.

We know how important the Blackboard Collaborate™ platform is for our clients to deliver core educational services. In the last year, our customers have held over 1 billion minutes of Web conferencing for class instruction, office hours, administrative meetings and more. That is why we strive to deliver top-notch service with high availability and reliability to our customers. Yesterday, we were not able to deliver that dependable service, which our customers expect and deserve and I wanted to address this issue head on.