Assignments

In course sites, the Assignments tool lets you to create, distribute, and collect assignments online. You can evaluate drafts of final projects or papers, and allow students to correct and re-submit assignments. The Assignments tool has an optional link to the Gradebook

This tool can help you eliminate paper assignments and reduce class time spent collecting and returning student work.

The Chat Room tool allows you to carry on real-time conversations with site participants who are signed in to bSpace. All chat messages are saved, and any site participant can read them.

You can use Chat Room to set up online office hours in which to answer student questions, and then make those answers available to all students. For project sites, Chat Room allows dispersed colleagues to communicate and keep on conversations they may have missed.

The Drop Box tool allows instructors and students to share documents in a private folder for each participant. Performance in this tool can be slow (for instructors) in courses of more than 30 students.

You can use the Drop Box to comment on students' ungraded incremental work, such as drafts of a large research project or a weekly journal entry.

The Forums tool, a discussion board, allows you to create and participate in structured conversations organized by category or topic. You have the option to allow students and other site participants to post their own discussion topics.

You can use this tool to create discussion categories such as "Homework Questions" and "Weekly Reading Discussion" for a course site, or discussion categories for a research project.

Gradebook

This tool allows instructors to compute course grades and download a simply formatted spreadsheet in preparation for submitting grades to the Registrar at the end of the semester. GSI s can download a spreadsheet to manage their own section off-line.

The Polls tool enables instructors to get quick, anonymous feedback from students via a single question poll. NOTE: This is an experimental tool which may have some bugs.

Quick and easy polls can be very useful in classes of any size. For instance, ask students if they heard about a relevant news event, to what degree they agreed with the point-of-view of a guest presenter, or if they completed the readings for a current topic.

Advanced users only. See ETS for a consultation.

The Quiz & Survey tool allows instructors to create low-stakes, online assessments to students or other groups. It can be used to provide students an opportunity to test their understanding of a concept, as well as gather survey information or informal course feedback.

The Resources tool allows you to publish material within your site, such as documents, links to websites, and HTML pages. You can create folders to organize resources and set permissions to control who sees the material (all members of your site or only certain groups/sections).

You can post weekly readings in your course's Resources section, as well as supplemental reading materials, presentations, and slides used in lectures.

The Schedule tool allows you to post items in a calendar format. All your course and project site schedule events appear in your personal schedule, called My Workspace Schedule. A synoptic view of the Schedule is also displayed on the Home page of your site.

The Section Info tool provides a way for instructors to efficiently manage sections of a class. The tool is designed to help an instructor manage a course that may consist of lectures, labs, discussions, studio work, recitations, or any combination thereof. As of fall 2007, there is an option to populate Section Info with information from the Rgistrar's office.

The Section/Group Info tool is designed to work with other tools, such as Announcements, Assignments, Gradebook, Forums, Resource, and Quiz & Survey.

Syllabus *

You can use the Syllabus tool to upload a syllabus or create an HTML version of your syllabus.