Blackboard Ultra: Creating a Sign Up List

Introduction

It’s quite common to want to create a sign-up list for tutorial slots. For example, you have 20 students that need to book a 30-minute tutorial with you on a particular day. There are several approaches to make this happen in a digital space, but this guide will focus on creating a document that can be shared and edited collaboratively. The same approach could be used via an Excel Spreadsheet, depending on your own preference.

This article includes both a tutorial video and a step-by-step guide, each following the same approach.

Tutorial video
Step-by-step Guide

Step One: Create the document

1. Go to https://portal.office.com and click on the Word icon located on the left-hand side of the screen.

2. Click the New Blank Document button to start a new document.

3. Create your document as appropriate. For example, you might want to create a table where students can put their names next to a designated time slot.

Image showing a basic student signup sheet being created in Microsoft Word

The above is an example of a Microsoft Word document setup as a signup sheet.

4. In the top left of the page, you can see the document’s name. It’ll most likely say something like Document1 – click that to rename it to something more meaningful (such as Sign Up List) and press Enter.

 

Step Two: Get the link to share

1. Still in Word, click the option to Share, located in the top right of the screen.

2. Click on the icon to Share. This will open up a small dialogue box labelled Send Link. Click the option that says “People you specify can view”.

Image showing how to configure the sharing setting in the Microsoft Word document.

3. You will now be presented with a small dialogue box labelled Link Settings. Click once on “People in Teesside University with link” to select this option (a small tick will appear to indicate it’s selected). Then, click on “Can View” and change it to “Can Edit”. Click Apply to keep these settings.

Image showing how to configure the sharing setting in the Microsoft Word document.

4. On the Send Link dialogue click the Copy button.  You will get a message to say “Link Copied”.

 

Step Three: Share the link with your students

1. Open Blackboard at https://bb.tees.ac.uk

2. Go into your module and decide where to put the link. Hover your mouse over that space, click the small circle with the + icon and select Create.

3. From the side panel, select Link.

4. Give the link a name (it will default to “New Link”).

5. Make it visible to students (the default is to be hidden from view).

6. In the Link URL box, you can paste the web link to the document that you created earlier (either right-click the mouse and paste or press Ctrl and V).

7. Click on Save.  The link will now be visible in the Blackboard Ultra module.

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