technology tips for sharing content with your students
Adding Files to Brightspace
A help feature called GET HELP on Brightspace to provide professors with more context-specific help. You can access it any time by hitting the Get Help button near the bottom right side of your screen. Through this button, you can get help with any feature of Brightspace, including how to add files to any area.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please be mindful of file sizes! Very large files can strain bandwidth and affect usage for both students and faculty.
Sharing in Microsoft 365 & Teams
Every instructor and student at GBC has free access to Microsoft 365. This online suite of productivity tools includes the full Microsoft suite of applications (notably Word, Excel, PowerPoint), as well as personal file storage on OneDrive. It also provides access to MS Teams. Teams has many features to share content, enable group work and file collaboration.
Find out more about Microsoft 365 & Teams
Embedding and linking to Video in the Brightspace
Faculty Videos
While Brightspace allows you to upload a video directly into your course, the large file size creates a bandwidth burden. It is recommended instead that you upload the video to another place (such as YouTube) and simply provide the link in your course.
How to add video on Brightspace
How to Upload Video to Stream (Faculty Instructions)
Students Submitting Videos
Students may need to submit videos of their presentations as part of their assignment. To reduce bandwidth strain, they should be discouraged from submitting their videos directly to Brightspace and instead be instructed to upload to another server (such as YouTube) and submit a link to their video.
To have students share and comment on one another's work, one strategy is for students to upload their videos to YouTube (or OneDrive) and submit a link to it in a Brightspace discussion forum post. Other students in the course can then watch the video and provide a comment in reply.
Other Tools
You might decide to post content on your blog, social media accounts, or other sites -- as always, it's a good idea to keep in mind the learning curve for students and the possible limitations in their access during this disruption. Wherever possible, post links to your external resources in one centralized spot such as Blackboard so that students can easily find the content in a consistent area.
