Welcome Week Brightspace Workshops, Fall 2026

Welcome Week, Fall 2026 Brightspace Workshop Schedule

8:30am – 9:15am: Grade Book in Brightspace

Presenter: Keith Landa
Location:Grade Book in Brightspace Teams Link
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.

9:30am – 10:15am: Perusall Social Annotation in Brightspace

Presenter: Keith Landa
Location: Perusall Social Annotation in Brightspace Teams Link
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. We’ll also preview new features that have been added for the fall semester.

10:30 – 11:15am: Introduction to AI Tools in Brightspace

Presenter: Keith Landa
Location: Introduction to AI Tools in Brightspace Teams Link
Description: Lumi Pro is the suite of AI tools for use in Brightspace courses. Currently, Lumi Pro in Brightspace focuses 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. We will also preview Lumi AI Tutor, a planned addition to Brightspace that provides study support for students.

11:30am – 12:15pm: VoiceThread Presentations and Media Discussions in Brightspace

Presenter: Keith Landa
Location: VoiceThread Presentations and Media Discussions in Brightspace Teams Link
Description: 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. Having students record comments on course materials in VoiceThread is a good way to promote authentic student voice in an age of AI generated content. 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 or other course materials, 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 VoiceThread and how to integrate it 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.

1:30pm – 2:30pm – Accessibility Improvement Tools in Brightspace

Presenters: Rebecca Oling & Marie Sciangula
Location: Accessibility Improvement Tools in Brightspace Teams Link
Description: Join us for an overview of available accessibility tools within Brightspace. Learn how to check course documents for accessibility compliance and make inline improvements without having to leave the LMS environment. Get insider tips on how to leverage these tools even outside of the LMS.