Bb 9.1 April 2014
Many faculty include images with content (announcements, discussion board instructions or posts, content items, etc.) that they create in Blackboard. The Blackboard tip for this week focuses on some best practices to follow when embedding images in a Blackboard textbox.
First, in order for an image to display properly in Blackboard, you need to embed it (How do I do that?), rather than simply copy and paste it. This is because, when you embed an image into a Blackboard textbox, that image is uploaded to the Course Files area of your course, where it becomes part of your course and can be viewed by all course users. An image that is copied and pasted is not uploaded to your Course Files area, and although you, as instructor, will be able to see it, your students will not be able to see the image when they view the item that you copied and pasted it into.
Second, if you embed an image in Blackboard, and that image was downloaded from a website (either directly or indirectly by doing a Google image search), the image may be in a file-format, such as .png or .bmp, that produces a very large file size. Accumulating a number of image files like this in your Blackboard course can make your course unmanageably large. In addition, in most cases, that image also functions as a web-link, and thus may serve as a conduit for a malicious process, which you would expose your students to if you were to directly embed that image into your course.
The process of putting an image file into a “size-friendly” format, while stripping it of any link function that it might perform, is a simple one.
PC users can simply open the file in MS Paint (which is included with all recent versions of Windows), and select the option of saving it as a JPEG file, which produces a good quality image with a small file size, and no link functionality. See the following screenshots:
As the following screenshots show, Mac users can get the same results by importing the image file into iPhoto (a program that is bundled with OS X), and then exporting it as a JPEG file (Note: “importing” and “exporting” in iPhoto is the same as “opening” and “saving” in MS Paint):
For related information, use the following link to view a tutorial on creating, editing and deleting images in Blackboard, read the link that the following link points to: Create/Edit/Delete Images
Use the following link to download a printable version of this Bb tip of the week: Download the Tip
Use the following link to view previous Bb tips of the week: BBTOTW-Archive
As always, please do not hesitate to contact the Distance and Online Learning Office (629-7070/DLHelp@hvcc.edu), if you have any questions, or if you would like to receive training on this topic.
Published: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 13:20:04 +0000 by m.petersen