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

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/  )

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

:-)

Laura