hello again, everybody - as you might have guessed from the message I
sent this weekend, one of my big goals this semester is to improve my
students' use of the Discussion Board. based on the problems and (to be
honest) sloppiness that I saw in the Discussion Board last semester, I'm
trying to give my students a lot of help this semester so that they will
have a better Discussion Board experience. for the Discussion Board to
work well, everybody needs to know how to create well-formatted and
appealing posts. they also need to know how to configure the Discussion
Board based on their own reading and browsing preferences.

so, in order to promote a better Discussion Board with my students this
semester, I have created a javascript with Desire2Learn Tips in it
(right now there are about a dozen tips; I'll keep adding more, but the
script makes that easy: I can keep adding tips, and the script updates
automatically). most of the tips are Discussion Board-related.

I've added this as a widget to my courses (see attached screenshot), and
the HTML code is available for anybody else who wants to do that: 
http://www.bestmoodle.net/ks/js/index_d2l.htm
<http://www.bestmoodle.net/ks/js/index_d2l.htm> 

plus, if you have tips you'd like to contribute, I'd be glad to hear
them!

alternatively, you can build your own tips script, focusing on tips
specific to your course (the tool to build this kind of random content
script can be found here - it was written by Randy Hoyt, an OU alum!  
http://www.r9tools.com/rotate/ <http://www.r9tools.com/rotate/>   )

I hope everybody's semester is off to a good start!

:-)

Laura