Tuesday, December 15, 2009

How to Embed a Vimeo Video in Blackboard

You may want to post a video in your Blackboard course using the Vimeo.com streaming service for several reasons, including:

1. You can post much longer videos using files that may normally be too large to upload to Blackboard successfully.
2. You can password protect your video and prevent students from downloading it
3. Videos embedded from Vimeo do not take up any quota space in your Blackboard course, no matter how long the video is.

Here's how to embed a Vimeo.com video in your Blackboard course:

[Update: This video below shows Blackboard version 7.x. You can embed videos in an almost identical way in Blackboard version 9.x as well. Just use Edit Mode=ON, and add an item to the course using the "Build Content" button. Then switching to HTML mode as shown in the video is exactly the same. Here's a video example of the process in Blackboard 9.1: http://j.mp/bbx4Ds]


Direct link to video: http://screencast.com/t/YTdmNDU4Z

(this video has audio, please adjust your sound settings)

Friday, December 11, 2009

How to Prevent Students from Printing Blackboard Documents (Using PDF)

Note: there isn't a 100% reliable way to prevent determined students from printing something you post on any website (the Blackboard site is no different). It is always possible for a student to use a screen-copier to copy what is displayed on the screen and then print it, or even to take a picture of the screen with a digital camera and then print it. However...

It is possible to create a PDF file that has a restriction on printing, which will stop the majority of students from being able to print, and will stop the casual user from being able to print. After you create a print-restricted PDF, you post it on Blackboard as you would any other file.

Here are two ways to create a PDF that is print-restricted:

1. Use PDFCreator
2. Using Adobe Acrobat

We hope this information is helpful.