New Box View to Bb Annotate

At the end of June, staff will notice a change in the way that they annotate students’ essays and reports in the Blackboard Assignment tool. Many staff use Turnitin to mark essays and reports, etc., and this update does not affect Turnitin at all; however, staff using the Blackboard Assignment tool will want to familiarise themselves with this update.

At present, the annotation function in the Blackboard Assignment tool is provided by New Box View, and it looks like this:

At the end of June, Blackboard are replacing New Box View with Bb Annotate. Following this upgrade you will notice that the tool looks a little different, and you’ll find that the annotation options have been greatly improved:

If you are planning on using the Blackboard Assignment tool to provide feedback and grades to students from July 2020 onwards, please familiarise yourself with the new Bb Annotate tool. Full guidance is available at: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Assignments/Grade_Assignments/Bb_Annotate

Notes about the migration from New Box View to Bb Annotate

• All pre-existing annotations created through New Box View will be migrated and visible in Bb Annotate.
• When a student or a member of staff accesses an annotated file during the migration, it will take a little bit longer to load but will be displayed in the new Bb Annotate viewer.
• If a member of staff is actively annotating a file using New Box View during the migration, the file will not migrate to Bb Annotate until the member of staff has completed that session. Upon loading the submission file again, it will display in the Bb Annotate viewer.
• Members of staff will be able to delete annotations as well as add new comments to any existing comment created using New Box View.

Supported file types in Bb Annotate

You can view and annotate these document types directly in the browser with Bb Annotate:

• Microsoft Word (DOC, DOCX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX)
• Microsoft Excel (XLS, XLSM, XLSX)
• OpenOffice Documents (ODS, ODT, ODP)
• Digital Images (JPEG, JPG, PNG, TIF, TIFF, TGA, BMP)
• Medical Images (DICOM, DICM, DCM)
• PDF
• PSD
• RTF
• TXT
• WPD

Help and support with Bb Annotate

Full guidance on using Bb Annotate is available at: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Assignments/Grade_Assignments/Bb_Annotate

Staff can also get help and support with Bb Annotate from their learning technologist:
https://libguides.northampton.ac.uk/learntech/staff/nile-help/who-is-my-learning-technologist