Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Blackboard 9

A question that came up at both of my Blackboard FAQs workshops during Professional Development week was, "When are we going to upgrade to the new version of Blackboard?"

At this time, we anticipate moving to the next version of Blackboard, which is known as Blackboard 9, or Bb 9, during the break between Spring 2010 and Summer 2010.

I'm often asked, "how big are the changes in Bb 9?"  The best analogy I've heard is that switching to Bb 9 is a lot like switching from Word 2003 to Word 2007 when they added the ribbon.  Word pretty much still did the same thing, but where you found the tools you were used to using was completely different.

The upgrade to Bb 9 will be a lot like that.  It still basically does all the same things it did before; it's just that the way you interact with it will be different.  You will no longer have to go to the Control Panel to make a lot of your changes.

I am planning on offering workshops in Bb 9 later in the semester.  I think it will be helpful to start everyone thinking about this now and will begin regularly posting to this blog about the new features.  The first resource I will give you is a video overview of Bb 9 that was created by Blackboard.

Please ask any of your colleagues who are not subscribed to this blog to do so, so they can get this information as well. Just have them go to http://cuyamaca-online.blogspot.com/ and put their email address in the email subscription box on the right side.

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