Menubar

Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly version

What it does

In your site, the toolbar is a customizable column along the left of the screen that contains links to numerous collaborative tools. Site owners (and those with an Instructor or Maintain role) have special permissions to add, edit, and delete tools with Worksite Setup or Site Info. Therefore, the same tools will not appear in every site. You can always add or delete tools after intial site creation.

Key concepts

Adding tools: A site participant with the appropriate role can modify the content of the site's menubar by adding or subtracting tools using the Site Info tool.

The site owner can choose to display (or hide) the following tools in the toolbar:

  • Home: This is the course or project site homepage. Home can contain a list of recent announcements, discussion items, and chat messages. Also, participants can access Privacy Status, and Messages and Forums notifications here.
  • Announcements: Post current, time-critical information (e.g., to inform users of changes in the schedule or policies of the class).
  • Assignments: Post, submit, and grade online assignments. Your participants can submit assignments electronically for grading and comments.
  • Chat Room: Hold real-time written discussions with other site participants. Chat is faster and more convenient than waiting for participants to post in the discussion area.
  • Drop Box: Create areas for private file sharing between site owner(s) and participants. If you prefer to grade everyones assignment at the same time the Assignment tool may be a better option for collecting student work. However the Drop Box tool allows you to grade multiple submissions from the same student in an easier fashion.
  • Email Archive: View email sent to the site. Site owners set up an email address that they can write to from outside bSpace. The mail will go to all participants and it will form a list within the Email Archive tool in bSpace.
  • Forums: Create discussion forums.
  • Gradebook: Calculate, store, and present grades.
  • Mailtool: Email tool that enables you to send mail to particular sections, GSIs, students or any compbination of site participants. You can also send mail to everyone from the Mailtool. You compose the email from within bSpace, unlike the Email Archive.
  • News: Link to RSS newsfeeds.
  • Polls: Site leaders can post simple multiple choice polls for voting by site participants.
  • Quiz & Survey: Create and deliver tests and surveys. This tool should not be used for high value testing (big tests, midterms, finals).
  • Resources: Upload, store, and share files and folders. Create a list of URLs. Create an HTML page within bSpace.
  • Roster: View the list of site participants, including enrollment information. If you are an instructor you have access to photos here as well.
  • Schedule: Post and view deadlines and events (e.g., class session dates, assignments dates, and cancellations).
  • Section Info: Create official course subgroupings or sections (e.g., labs or recitations) that are revealed in various tools (e.g., Resources).
  • Site Info: Site Info displays information about the site for site participants. Site leaders can use this tool to edit site information, edit tools, attach a class roster, manually add participants (including extrernal guests), manage groups (project sites), import files, and rearrange the order of tools. This tool is part of every site, and cannot be deleted from the menubar. It is essentially the administrative center of your site.
  • Syllabus: Create and display a course syllabus, or have it point to a pre-existing online syllabus.
  • Web Content: Add web page to the menubar. You can add more than one but keep in mind that Web Content should be used for a site participants view regularly. For assorted links, it is best to put them in Resources.
  • Wiki: Collaborate with other participants to create and maintain web pages.

The Help tool has support documentation for all the tools, and can contain links to other support resources.

Note: Your system administrator controls which tools are available on your system. When new tools become available, or users' needs change, your system administrator can add tools to the system, and then they will appear in the list of tools that you can add to your site.

Things to consider

  • To avoid the accidental loss of resources, assign roles wisely. Assign roles with broad permissions only to co-instructors and others whom you can trust to edit your site. Everyone else should get a more restricted role, allowing access but not site manipulation. For instance, if another participant removes the Syllabus tool from your site, it will irreversibly remove the syllabus information that you stored there.