Banners with Powerpoint

CREATE A BANNER WITH POWERPOINT

Ever wondered how you can create a banner for your course? PowerPoint could be your answer. Not everyone has image creation/manipulation program but most of us not only have access to PowerPoint, we know how to use it – at least as a presentation tool.

Check out these steps for using PowerPoint to create a banner.

CREATE

1. Open PowerPoint
2. Go into the page setup area
a. 1997-2003: file to page setup
b. 2007: Design tab to page setup
3. In the “slides sized for” dropdown list choose banner

4. Click Ok
5. Create the banner using PowerPoint tools. Add
the background, text, images, word art, smart art, whatever you want.

Your banner is now created. Now you need to save it and upload it to Blackboard.

SAVE

1. File to Save
2. Navigate to where you want to save the file on your hard drive
3. Give the file a name (NO SPACES – files that are to be placed in Blackboard should not have spaces)
4. In the “Save as type” dropdown list change this to GIF or JPEG file type
a. GIF is generally used if you use clip art images
b. JPEG is generally used if you use photos images
c. If you aren’t using images, save it as GIF

5. You now have the image file and you are ready to put it in Blackboard

UPLOAD

Now that you have your banner, you need to upload it into your course in Blackboard. The Banner appears on the Announcement page of your course.

1. Login to Blackboard and go into your course
2. Go to control panel to Course Design (in the Course Options area) to Course Banner
3. Click the Browse button to the right of the New Banner Image area

4. Navigate to where you saved your banner on your hard drive
5. Select the file (double click it or click it once then click open)
6. Now you are back in Blackboard and your file path is listed in the New banner image area
7. Click Submit
8. Your banner has now been added to your course

To see your new banner, click the first link in the breadcrumbs to get back to the announcement page of the course.

TIP: Customize your course list

Did you know you can customize your course list on your eLearning Portal? This will allow you to turn courses and some course options on and off.

For example, sometimes you may have several courses listed on your course page that you no longer need. These can be old courses, training shells or development shells. You can set these courses to not show on the portal. This doesn't delete the course or make it unavailable to students - this is only for your view of your course module. Students can also use this to turn off old courses.

You can also use this to turn on what you see about the course like the course id (course code), announcements, tasks or the calendar for the course.

To change your course settings in the module, click on the pencil icon in the title bar of the course list module.

Once you've clicked on the pencil icon, use the check boxes to set what you see for a particular course. You can uncheck everything for a course to remove it from your course list or select the check boxes for what you want to see.

Click submit at the bottom of the page when done.

You will now notice the changes in your Course List module on the first page.

Questions about this tip? email me

Welcome to eTips

Hello KCTCS faculty and staff!

Welcome to the eTips blog. This blog will be used to post tips for online learning. A new tip will be posted each week. These tips will cover a variety of topics about eLearning. Whether your class is web-enhanced, hybrid or completely online, these tips are for you.

You'll find tips about using Blackboard, content creation, tools for teaching online andanything in between.

I hope you find this a valuable resource. Email your tips in to be shared with everyone.