Reading Discussion Board Postings |
Discussion boards are organized in threads, which one or more initial postings, and then a thread of postings responding to that original post. Below is an illustration showing two threads in a discussion, one titled "Nobody wants to be first," and the second titled "Help." When you're reading a series of postings, none of which are in a thread yet (in other words, they're individual postings not yet responding to each other), it's a big pain in Blackboard to click forward and back over and over to read every one. An easier way to do this is, once you're inside the discussion board, to click on the Show Options tab just above the first message posted in the board:
You'll get a new toolbar across the top:
Click on Select All (or just individually click the messages you want to read if you don't want to read everything), then Collect. It may take a minute, but Blackboard will then pull all the messages you want to read into a single screen, and you can still reply to whatever individual messages you like.
One more note about Blackboard: you may notice that the program doesn't respond well to the use of the Back and Forward buttons on your browser. Sometimes they work, others, forget it. It's more reliable if you use the navigation tools to the left and across the top of the screen.
This page copyright 2000-2007 by Lisa Hammond | last update 10 July 2005