Instructional Design Center Editing Text in Blackboard Items & Using the Text Editor

Instructional Design Center Introduction: Hi, I’m Kara, an Instructional Designer at EKU. I’d like to take a few minutes to walk you through the steps of editing text within a Blackboard Item. This skill is useful when updating courses from semester to semester or building new courses in Blackboard. Blackboard text editor is integrated heavily throughout the Learning Management System. Learning to use the text editor effectively can allow you to easily manipulate all text used throughout Blackboard. The beginning of this tutorial will focus on editing text in a Blackboard item. Keep in mind that the same text editor appears throughout Blackboard and mastering the text editor will lead to more efficient use. Let’s get started!

Instructional Design Center To edit text within a menu item in blackboard, click the grey drop down menu from the item title.

Instructional Design Center From the dropdown box, select the edit option.

Instructional Design Center From this text menu, you may type new text and make edits to all existing text.

Instructional Design Center When you are finished making text edits, click the submit button at the bottom right corner of the screen. All edits have now been saved to the blackboard site.

Instructional Design Center The next few slides highlight commonly used items within the text editor that are helpful with typing in the text editor and making edits. These tools include: bold, italicize, underline, and strike through

Instructional Design Center These text editing options allow you to add bullets or numbers to your lists. The drop down menu allows you to chose what type of bullet or numbering system (see images to the right)

Instructional Design Center The tool that looks like an eraser is meant to remove unwanted formatting in your text. To do this simply highlight your text, click the eraser tool seen below, and unwanted formatting can be removed.

Instructional Design Center These tools allow you to align text left, align center, align right, and align full.

Instructional Design Center This tool is used in order to indent right and indent left.

Instructional Design Center The “link” tool is commonly used and serves as an excellent tool to hyperlink web content. The next few slides will walk you through inserting hyperlinks in text.

Instructional Design Center To hyperlink to any web address, highlight the text you wish to hyperlink.

Instructional Design Center In the new window that appears, type the name of the web address (or copy/paste the web address) in box 1. In box 2, select that you want the website to “open in an ew window (_blank)”. This will ensure that your website will open in a new window when students click the website. Type the “title” of the link in box 3. This ensures allows the hyperlink to be accessible to all users. Click “insert”.

Instructional Design Center Click “submit”.

Instructional Design Center Now your hyperlink is live within the blackboard item!