It’s Here! Release 8.0 for the Blackboard Academic Suite™ is now available. Developed in close collaboration with our clients, Release 8.0 is centered on maximizing teacher productivity and empowering teachers to focus on critical thinking skills.

Blackboard Grade Center™: An Intelligent Gradebook

Teachers will be delighted by the Blackboard Grade Center, our completely redesigned Gradebook. This easy-to-use smart grading tool saves teachers time, offers flexibility and provides easy but powerful analysis. Based on significant client involvement, the new Blackboard Grade Center simplifies the grading process while making it a more powerful instructional tool for K-12 teaching and learning.

A newly designed grid-view enables teachers to accomplish most grading activities – such as entering and changing grades or adding comments -- without ever clicking to a new page.  Teachers will never lose track of which student they are grading by choosing which columns they want frozen. This way, they can scroll to over to an assignment but prominently see student names.  And since not all classrooms and districts are alike, the Blackboard Grade Center offers flexibility so each teacher can set up their gradebook as they prefer or as their district requires. By creating date-specific grading periods, teachers can view and grade according to their instructional plan. 

To meet the needs of a diverse and transient student population, teachers can exempt students from assignments and assessments and set up categories to automatically drop the highest or lowest grades.  Overall, Jed Friedrichsen, Chief Administrative Officer, Blendedschools.net puts it best: “The new Blackboard Grade Center is the answer to K-12 teachers’ dreams. With grading periods, progress reports and an easy-to-use interface, teachers can say goodbye to their paper grade books, offline spreadsheets and other grading software.”

Empower Students with Self and Peer Assessments

A new Self and Peer Assessment tool, created by a Blackboard client, puts students in control of their learning, builds critical thinking skills, and saves teachers time. Self Assessment enables students to review and grade their own work by following key criteria set by their teacher, thereby encouraging them to reflect and monitor their own progress. With Peer Assessments, students can anonymously review and grade work submitted by their classmates following teacher-set criteria, encouraging them to better understand the assignment objectives and learn the perspectives of others. Self and Peer Assessment also empowers students to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, learn how to collaborate, and provides opportunities to offer constructive criticism—all important 21st Century skills.

Prevent Plagiarism and Expand Social Networking

Plagiarism has always been challenging for educators. With the wealth of resources available on the Internet, plagiarism is often difficult and time-consuming to detect. That’s why we’ve integrated SafeAssign™ into Release 8.0 at no additional cost to Enterprise License clients. SafeAssign not only helps students learn crucial citation and plagiarism rules, but also helps teachers ensure originality without time-consuming investigations.

Release 8.0 also integrates Blackboard Scholar® into the Blackboard Learning System™ – Basic License. This innovative social bookmarking feature enables students and teachers to find and share education-related resources. Rather than saving—or “bookmarking”—favorite Web sites in a browser or course, they can be stored and easily accessed from any Internet-enabled computer by using Blackboard Scholar.

Collaboratively Develop District-Wide Curriculum

Quality curriculum is core to good teaching and learning. But it’s hard to ensure that all teachers have access to exemplary content. With this in mind, we’ve made enhancements that will enable users to:

• Facilitate lesson plan and curriculum reviews with improved workflows: Whether teachers are submitting lesson plans for a formal review or a team is collaboratively developing curriculum, enhanced workflows provide a more defined and repeatable process that can be customized to a district’s needs.
    
• Create courses quickly: Create it once, use it again. With deep integration throughout the Blackboard Academic Suite, teachers can discover and share Reusable Objects enabling teachers and content creators to create courses quickly.
    
• Classify content your way: Classification of content (via metadata) has been enhanced throughout the Blackboard Academic Suite. Add custom metadata during the content creation process and display it in the Blackboard Learning System – Enterprise License.
    
• Glean insight from the 360° view: This tool helps administrators make informed decisions about deleting old files and dedicating resources to updating content. The 360° view provides statistics, tracking, permissions and other information about specific content.

If you are interested in Release 8.0 and all it has to offer, please visit the What’s New section of our website.