Computing Services and Instructional Technology

The Digital Dropbox, a Blackboard feature that allows students to upload files for the instructor to grade, is slated for removal in a future release of Blackboard. What's more, there's a much better way to do things. Consequently, I'm encouraging everyone to move away from using the digital dropbox.

The dropbox is being replaced by the assignments feature. The major improvement is that the documents submitted via the assignments feature are categorized by assignment, whereas the dropbox is just one big wild and woolly repository for everything that gets handed in ever. That means that it's easier to find new submissions, and easier to correlate documents with their assignments. Furthermore, each assignment you create is automatically entered into the gradebook and, since each document is associated with an assignment, entering grades into the Blackboard gradebook is made even easier.

To create a new assignment, go to the Control Panel, and then to the content area you want to add the assignment to -- this is probably "Assignments." Normally, you'd click the "+Item" button. Instead, pull down the drop-down menu on the top right of the page next to the word "Select," choose "Assignment," and click "Go." At this point, you'll just add an item like normal, and click "Submit." (There are some new things in "Options," but you can generally just leave those alone.) If you use the gradebook, then you can set the number of points possible; if not, feel free to ignore that blank.

Once you've created the assignment, you'll see that there's a link under it called "View/Complete Assignment." When students click on that link, they're given a text box so that they can type in a response, and also the option to upload a file, e.g., from Excel.

Once the student has completed the assignment, it will be marked as completed. To view the assignments that have been finished, go to the gradebook. (You'll access them through the gradebook even if you don't use it.) In the column for your assignment, any student with an exclamation point has completed the assignment and awaits grading. Clicking the exclamation point will let you view or download the file and, if you want, enter a grade for it.

If you want to experiment, there is a test student account set up for this very purpose. If you search for a user called 'student' to add to your course, you'll find the account. To login, submit a ticket with the problem type "Blackboard" and ask for the password.