We're excited to announce that on May 17, 2008, IRT will upgrade Blackboard (My UST) to bring the St. Thomas community some much sought after enhancements for student assessment, feedback and reporting, and collaborative group projects. For video tutorials and helpsheets on the new tools, visit the Blackboard Training site.

Announcing the Grade Center
The Gradebook is re-designed and re-named to the Grade Center. Some of the new features of the Grade Center are listed below. View a video introduction to the Grade Center. 

• Inline editing: the ability to enter grades directly through the Grade Center spreadsheet
• A redesigned tool bar, titled the Action Bar, through which multiple functions are possible
• The ability to create and print Reports, such as final grades, to hand out to students or other interested parties
• Smart Views -- the ability to categorize Students into groupings based onselected criteria. These views can be displayed in the Grade Center 

Self & Peer Assessment: allows instructors to create an exercise with a list of questions for the assessor. These questions can have a variety of grading or marking criteria, created or selected by the instructor, to be used in the assessment. Instructor distributes the exercise with the questions and criteria to students who assess his or her own work or the works of other students.

Content System Collaboration: through the new Collaboration workflows tool, it is possible to create, initiate, and manage a chronological collection of tasks that comprise a business process, an assignment, or a collaborative project.