Once a student has clicked through an assignment in Blackboard, you will see their information on the “Students tab” of the course manager and a notebook icon should appear in the row.
Notice the name, email, section, activities, and time of last activity is listed for every student.
- Clicking the notebook icon for a given student will allow you to see their student notebook
- You can change the section of an individual student via the drop-down menus in the “Section” column.
Submitting new Content to your Students and Editing Existing Content
Your students do not automatically see the changes you make to the Instructor course notebook. In order to “push out” any changes to the notebook (new assignments, edits to old ones, new schedule, etc.), you MUST click the button. This is located at the top left-hand side of the Course Manager.
If you have added a new assignment in your LabArchives Instructor notebook that you would like to link to an assignment in Blackboard, you must first Update Student Notebooks, and then link the new LabArchives assignment to the corresponding assignment in Blackboard. Learn more about how to link your assignment, here.
Once you click on “Update Student Notebooks” an alert will appear to confirm your update of notebooks.
NOTE: If you make changes in your Instructor Notebook to an entry that has already been pushed to your students, and a student has edited that entry, changes will not be made to the student’s entry when you push out the update. The student’s edits will remain in their notebook. However, if you as the instructor have made edits in the student’s notebook, and then push a change to that content from your Instructor notebook, your edits will be overwritten. As a best practice, we recommend only pushing new entries to already created student notebooks.
Observing Student Activity
When your LabArchives course is linked to Blackboard, you still have the option to observe student activity in LabArchives as shown below:
After students’ complete actions in the notebook, you will see a notification in the “View” column of the Notebook Navigator.
Activity Feed Icon: This icon directs the user to the student’s activity feed. For more information about the activity feed, click here.
Notification Icon: This will direct you to the student’s assignment or activity feed list of assignments
Searching a Student’s Notebook
Under the LabArchives Assignment Navigator, you are able to do a basic search and Advanced Search in a student’s notebook. To perform an advanced search, click on the downward triangle at the end of search bar.
If you would like to hide the search bar, you can click on the arrow, located on the right-hand side of the screen under the exporting options.
Export Student Notebooks to PDF and Offline HTML
Under the LabArchives Assignment Navigator, you are able to download a student’s notebook to an Offline Notebook and PDF.
Click on this button, to create an Offline Notebook of a student’s notebook.
Click on this button, to create a PDF copy of a student’s notebook.
After selecting one of these options, a download link will be sent to you via the email address registered with your account.
Send Announcements
Another feature we offer is sending announcements in LabArchives. This will show a yellow banner when the students are viewing their LabArchives notebook. You can do this by:
- Open the Course Manager
- Go to the Students tab
- Click “Send Announcement” above the table that shows all students in the Students Tab.
- You can send an announcement to all students, students in one section, or to selected students. Toggle these choices using the buttons in the window that appears.
After you send the announcement, students will see a yellow banner near the top of their screen the next time they access the LabArchives notebook.