Fall 2024 Welcome Week Brightspace Workshops

2024 Fall Welcome Week Brightspace Workshops (8:30am - 12:15pm)

Watch all Brightspace Welcome Week workshop session recordings on YouTube

Introduction to Brightspace (8:30am - 9:15am)

Facilitator: Keith Landa, Director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center
Location: Microsoft Teams (Watch the “Introduction to Brightspace” recording)
Description: Beginning with an empty Brightspace course shell, this session will demonstrate how to create and customize course modules to reflect your course organization (e.g., topics, weeks, etc). We will then review how to populate your course modules by adding various resources and activities, including: uploading files, creating course pages, adding assignments, creating quizzes (and question banks), adding discussions, etc. Depending on interest, we may also go over creating announcements and setting up virtual classroom sessions.

Brightspace Grade Book (9:30am - 10:15am)

Facilitator: Keith Landa, Director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center
Location: Microsoft Teams (Watch the “Brightspace Grade Book” recording)
Description: This session will go over options for grade book settings, and present strategies for various grading schema options: total points, categories and percentages, etc. We will also review how to ensure that assignments, quizzes, discussions, and other graded activities in Brightspace show up in the grade book, and how to add grade book items for activities that are taking place outside of Brightspace. Finally, we will look at options for entering and working with grade data in your Brightspace grade book.

Perusall Social Annotation in Brightspace (10:30am - 11:15am)

Facilitator: Keith Landa, Director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center
Location: Microsoft Teams (Watch the “Perusall Social Annotation in Brightspace” recording)
Description: Perusall is a social annotation platform where you and your students can collaboratively mark up and discuss course materials. By working together directly within the assigned material, there is a greater context within which discussions of course materials take place. You can use Perusall for social annotation of PDF articles, book chapters, web sites, images, videos, and other resources. This session will show how to set up your Brightspace course to use Perusall, some basic settings for your course Perusall environment, how to add course materials to your Perusall library, setting up social annotation assignments, and how to add those assignments to your Brightspace course.

VoiceThread Presentations and Media Discussions in Brightspace (11:30am - 12:15pm)

Facilitator: Keith Landa, Director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center
Location: Microsoft Teams (Watch the “VoiceThread Presentations and Media Discussions in Brightspace” recording)
Description: VoiceThread allows you and/or your students to put together online slide decks that you can narrate and annotate, including text, images, videos, and other materials. You can use VoiceThread to give an online lecture to your students, have your students submit presentations, or have a class discussion around media resources. This session will show how to set up your Brightspace course to use VoiceThread, cover some basics of creating VoiceThread presentations, and review the different types of VoiceThread assignments that are available.

Brightspace Basics Virtual One-on-One Consultation (1:00pm-4:00pm)

Facilitator: Marie Sciangula, Assistant Director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center
Location: Microsoft Teams
Description: As part of Welcome Week 2024, please feel free to book a 20-minute Brightspace Basics Virtual one-on-one consultation session for Monday, August 19, 1pm-4pm via Microsoft Teams.