Integrating Facebook with Blackboard
Design Pattern Tags : Blackboard (online learning)
Integrating Facebook with Blackboard December 2015
A technique for integrating the learning community for a course on #Facebook with a #Blackboard site to encourage #sociallearning, #peerlearning and sharing.
Rationale There is already an active student community using the Program Facebook page. In redeveloping the Program site we wanted to create a useable and functional Blackboard site that would encourage students to visit and return. It was considered important that a sense of community be developed within the Program site. Rather than attempt to recreate a community within the Blackboard Program site it was decided to incorporate the existing community into the space.
Eventually other social media channels may be incorporated into the site as well. The most notable examples being Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. The highly visual nature of the courses that form the program lend themselves well to this form of presentation.
Learners/Context As part of the redevelopment of the Blackboard Program site for the Certificate IV in Textile Design and Development it was considered desirable to integrate the active community that already existed for students in the Program on Facebook . To do this we embedded the Facebook page into the Program Blackboard site.
Instructions/Processes First create a location in Blackboard where you would like the Facebook page to appear. In this case we created a Folder in the program site. Within the folder we then created an Item.
Now we need to add some code to this Item.
Facebook offers a number of plugins to achieve this outcome. In this case we used the Page Plugin which can be found at http://actrb.co/1NaTRpV
You need to enter the url of page that you wish to use. You then configure the height, width and other options before clicking the ‘Get Code’ button.
There are two pieces of code that are generated by Facebook. These need to be placed into the Blackboard site.
In the Item edit screen in Blackboard you need to switch into HTML mode. You do this by clicking the button marked HTML in the toolbar for the text editor. If you don’t see the HTML button then you may need to click the double down arrows at the right end of the text editor toolbar.
You will be presented with an empty pop up window called ‘HTML Code View’.
You now need to copy the two pieces of code generated by Facebook into this window. Make sure that you do them in the same order that is presented by Facebook.
Click ‘Update’ and the HTML Code View will disappear. Then click ‘Submit’ to save the content Item. The Facebook page will now appear embedded in Blackboard.
Resources/ Technology Related Patterns
