Welcome Week Brightspace Workshops, Fall 2025

Monday, August 18, 2025

8:30am - 9:15am  - VoiceThread Presentations and Media Discussions in Brightspace

Register for VoiceThread Presentations and Media Discussions in Brightspace

VoiceThread is an application where you and your students can put together collections of slides containing various media (graphics, images, video, text, etc.), on which you can hold asynchronous conversations through audio, video, and text comments, as well as being able to annotate the slides. VoiceThreads can be used for your classes in many ways, such as instructor presentations (for in-person as well as online courses), class discussion of images related to course topics, gallery talks and critiques, oral practice in language classes, a way for individual students or groups to share presentations with the class or turn them in as assignments, etc. This workshop will introduce VoiceThreads and how to integrate them into your Brightspace courses. We will focus on how you can create VoiceThread presentations to share with your students, and then cover the types of VoiceThread assignments you can set up for your students. 

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

Register now for Brightspace Grade Book

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. 

10:00am - 3:00pm - Brightspace Basics Virtual Drop-In Support

Get live drop-in Brightspace support via Microsoft Teams! First come, first served. Open to All Faculty.

Join on Teams

Topics can include:

• using communication tools (e.g. sending emails to entire class, creating announcements)
• adding resources (e.g, creating modules, uploading files, authoring web pages)
• creating activities (e.g. setting up assignments, creating quizzes, starting discussion forums)
• connecting courses to third-party tools (e.g. VoiceThread, Perusall, Turnitin, etc.) and
• contacting the SUNY Online Help Desk for support.

10:30am - 11:15am - Introduction to Lumi Course Tools in Brightspace

Register for Introduction to Lumi Course Tools in Brightspace

Lumi Pro is the new suite of AI tools for use in Brightspace courses. So far, the focus in on AI uses that support faculty with course development and other workflows. This workshop will introduce the Lumi Pro additions to Brightspace, and demonstrate how to use the tools to generate suggested quiz questions, assignment prompts, and discussion forum prompts. 

11:30am - 12:15pm - Perusall Social Annotation in Brightspace

Register for Perusall Social Annotation in Brightspace

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.