Tool

Description

Blog

The blog tool allows you and your students to share information on topics and interests. Using the blog tool you can have your students post items on a topic that you assign and have other students comment on them. You can also view and comment on their progress and blog. Blogs can be both public and private.

Chat

Chat tools allow you and your students to communicate via text while online at the same time. Using the D2L Chat tool, students can hold private chats with other students in the course or communicate on group projects. You can also use the Chat to hold online office hours.

Content

The Content tool allows you to post and organize relevant learning materials for your students. Content material can range from basic text to multimedia files.

Discussions

The Discussions tool can be used for online discussions between you and your students or between groups of students. After setting up a discussion Forum (major categories), you can create individual topics within the forum for discussion. Students can post messages in a threaded discussion. Students can also attach documents to their messages.

Dropbox

The Dropbox tool is an electronic storage space for documents submitted by your students. You can create multiple folders for assignments that can be opened and/or closed for submission based on specific dates and times.

Grades

The Grades tool allows you to establish an online grade book. Items in the grade book can be tied to other D2L tools such as the Dropbox and Quizzes tools so that a grade entered in one of these tools is automatically updated in the grade book. Question items from the Quizzes tool such as multiple-choice, true/false, matching, ordering, etc. can be set to grade the items automatically and then update the grade book. Students can use the Grades tool to check their grade at anytime during the course.

Groups

Groups can be created to arrange students in your class who should have different access to course tools.

NavBar

The NavBar contains links to the various D2L tools that you have defined. It is made up of the red and blue lines at the top of the D2L page. Editing the NavBar allows you to change the tools that are accessible to your students.

News

Found on the Course Home page, News allows you to post messages to your students so that they will see it when they first enter your course page. These messages can be released or removed based on a date and time

Pager

.The Pager allows you and your students to page each other by sending a short text message. The next time that the person being paged enters the course, the pager will flash and beep that a message is waiting.

Quizzes

The Quizzes tool allows you to create a variety of assessments for your students. While labeled Quizzes, this tool can be used for exams, surveys, and/or homework assignments. The Quizzes tool can be used to create the following types of questions: multiple-choice, true/false, arithmetic (including specifying ranges of numbers with significant figures), fill-in-the-blank, multi-select, matching, ordering, and long and short answers. Many of these questions can be graded automatically and then automatically entered into the Grades tool. Quizzes can be released conditionally based on date and time.

Survey

Similar to the Quizzes tool, but you cannot connect a Survey to the Grades tool and it has less question response tracking capabilities than Quizzes. If you need that kind of information you must use the Quiz tool. Simply name the Quiz as a Survey. The Survey tool allows you to create assessment items such as multiple-choice, true/false, arithmetic, fill-in-the-blank, multi-select, matching, ordering, and long and short answers. The Survey tool allows you to keep a record of the student's response or makes the survey anonymous.