Generating a Photo Roster for Your Course

Blackboard allows you to list students in your course, but that provides you only with the name, user name, and e-mail address of your students. We have created a custom add-on to Blackboard that allows you to generate a photo roster for your course, pulling the pictures for the roster from the campus directory, and allowing you to see as well other very useful information about your students (class year and major, for example). Since we enroll students in Blackboard courses automatically starting two weeks before a semester begins, and since we update rosters every night with information pulled from Banner, the photo roster feature will allow you to learn the students names in your course either before the course meets (if you are so inclined) or once the roster has stabilized for your course. To generate such a photo roster:

1. Log in to Blackboard (opens in new window), and click on your course among the list of "Courses you are teaching" in the My Courses section of the opening page. Within that course, go to the Control Panel by clicking on the icon near the bottom of the left-hand navigation menu.

2. Within the Course Tools section of the Control Panel (on the left-hand side of your browser window), click on the Photo Roster link:

   

3. Choose the options you want for how to display the names of your students and what other information to include on the page: for example, Class Year and Major. Then click on the Generate Photo Roster button to open up a new browser window with the photo roster for your course:

   

4. You can print out the photo roster and bring it to class - or use the photo roster as a way to learn student names outside of class time.

5. Once you've printed out the roster, you can close that second browser window, and you can click on the button in the main Blackboard window to return to the Control Panel for your course.

Last revised November 9, 2006.   Please send questions or comments to itec@bucknell.edu.