Connecting Dropbox to Blackboard

The Blackboard LMS has functionality to upload files for the students, such as slides or laboratory protocols. Unfortunately the Blackboard user interface is not very user friendly. In fact I agree with the assessment of this teacher.  The amount of pointing and clicking in order to upload files feels very 1995.

For this reason I have started using Dropbox for distributing files to my students. This blog post is meant to show how. I will assume that you already have Dropbox installed on your computer, otherwise head over here and get yourself an account (they are free up to some level of storage). There are other similar services to Dropbox that would work as well, but I have not used them.

In this example I am teaching a course called "Biologia Molecular Aplicada" or BMA for short.

I first create a folder called BMA15 in my public Dropbox. The public Dropbox is called "Public" and is located inside the main Dropbox folder. New installations may not have this folder activated by default, but this link shows how it is activated.

After creating a Dropbox folder called "BMA15" in the Public folder, Click on the Share box:

You will see the dialog below:

It is important that the permission is set to "Anyone with the link can see it", if not change the permissions. I have edited out some of the URL in this image, and there is an important reason for this which I will be discussed below.

Copy this link to folder and head over to Blackboard.

Create a new content item of the type "web link" ("Link de Web"). 

Paste the link in the URL window and name the link for example "Course Files". I also put some text in the description field. Click "send" or "Enviar" when you are done.

The link visible to the students will look like this:

Clicking on the link will take them to the Dropbox site which shows the folder structure of the BMA15 folder. In the BMA15 folder, I have created one folder for each lesson named by date, but this is optional.

These folders have downloadable files that are reflected by the Dropbox folder on my computer. I have three files in the 2015-10-01 folder:

These files are also present as local files on my computer:

Now I can simply add folders and files in the BMA15 folder and these will be almost instantly visible to the students.

One of the advantages of this workflow is that changes to files will be uploaded to Dropbox without any extra user input. Great for correcting errors in the material.

Now, remember the URL I edited out above. I did this because the folder is accessible for anyone who has the link, and I would like to restrict access to my students. In theory, Google may index the content in the folder, but if there are no links pointing to the folder, Google will not find it. The only link to the folder should be in the Blackboard content area, which is only accessible to students. 

You should not create public web links to the content, or the files may show up in Googles search results. I usually remove the course folder from the Public folder after the course is over.

How to embed a google calendar in Blackboard

We use Blackboard for organizing teaching material at our University. Blackboard has a built it calendar, but this is quite difficult to use.

I use google calendar, both professionally and privately. I will show how to embed a google calendar in Blackboard.

Start by creating a new calendar for the course in your Google account:

Click on the "Customize the color, size, and other options" link in the middle of the page.

On the next page, select useful options such as:

• Default view "week"
• Week starts on Monday

When you are done, click on the "Update HTML" button on the upper right corner of the page.

Then copy all text in the window like so: 

Go to Blackboard and create a new content item ("conteúdo" in Portugese). Name this "calendar" or something similar. Click on the "Show HTML code" button ("exibição de código HTML")

Paste the text from the google calendar in the HTML window. 

Then click "Atualizar". You will see the screen below afterwards:

Click on "Enviar" and you should be done!

The calendar is dynamic and will be automatically updated by updating the google calendar.