Announcements are an ideal way to post time-sensitive information critical to course success, such as:

• Due dates for assignments and projects.
• Changes to your syllabus.
• Corrections/clarifications of materials.
• Exam schedules.

You can add, edit, and delete announcements from the Announcements page. When you add an announcement, you can also send it as an email to students in your course. This way, students receive the announcement even if they don't log in to your course. 

Welcome your students: Let students know you are glad they're here. An inviting tone—somewhat informal, but still professional—is equivalent to a smile and a greeting to a student who walks through the door in a traditional class. 

More information about Course Announcements

How to Create Announcements in Your Course

Keeping your students informed on timely issues in your course is critically important to their continued success. Create Announcements in the Original Course View
video shows you how to create an announcement in your Learn course, how to immediately send notification of the announcement to your students, and how to reorder announcements so they appear in your desired order. After watching the video, open another tab or window, replay the video and follow the instructions to create your course welcome message/announcement in your course using the text editor options. 

Discussions are a good way to encourage students to think critically about your coursework and interact with each other’s ideas. You can create discussions around individual course lessons or for your course in general. As the instructor, you own the discussions. After you start a discussion, you can post comments of your own to guide students.

Note: To promote originality, creativity, and a variety of responses, you can choose Participants must create a thread to view other threads in this forum, which is the post first setting. Students must respond before they can read their classmates' posts. In Standard View, everyone can see all previously created threads in the forum.

More about Discussions, Forums, and Threads

How to Use Blackboard Discussions

Participate in lively discussions to collaborate and share ideas. Use Discussions in the Original Course View video explains the features instructors and students use to interact in Blackboard Learn discussions.

After watching the video, open another tab or window, replay the video and follow the instructions to create a discussion forum using in your course.

The email tool allows you to send email students in your course without launching a separate email program. You can send email to individual users or to groups of users.

More information about sending email in your course.

Send Email

Check out this short video, Send Email in the Original Experience to learn more about sending email from within Blackboard Learn. Send email directly from Blackboard to any member of your course. Use the convenient email tool to communicate with everyone enrolled in your course. Email sent from Blackboard is received and stored in your email program, not in Blackboard.

After watching the video, open another tab or window, replay the video and review the instructions to send an email to all users in your course. Do NOT actually send the email.

About Blackboard Collaborate Ultra

You can use a robust tool set that allows you to web conference and connect with one student or your entire class. You and your students can collaborate using audio, video, and recording capabilities. You can also use private and public chat, a whiteboard, application sharing, a clip art library, and add and edit content at any time.

More information about Blackboard Collaborate.

Collaborating in Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience

Welcome to Blackboard’s next generation web conferencing. It's designed to run right in the browser, making online collaboration easier than ever. Group work, meetings, lectures, and more… whatever your goal, Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience makes communication easy. Now, you can forget about the technology... and focus on each other. This video, Collaborating in Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience presents an example of classroom collaboration using Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience. Including file sharing, group annotation of the shared file, hand raise, notifications, video, chat, polling and breakout groups.

Self-Reflection: Video Conferencing with Blackboard Collaborate

Now it's your turn to decide how you can support student learning with live web-conferencing. Create a new thread and list three-four things you might want to use Blackboard Collaborate for in your course. Consider the following:

1. Is there a topic in your class that seems to be very complex and requires extra time? Would it be helpful for your students to bring their questions to a live session on Blackboard Collaborate?
2. Is there an exam review session or a group study session that you want to schedule outside regular class ours?
3. Do you have to travel to a conference or take a sick day and now looking for a way to "catch-up"? Do you think scheduling a remote web-conference session might help?
4. Do you want to bring a guest speaker to your class? Consider inviting them to attend your class virtually to respect their time and to work with their schedule