Menubar: Overview

What it does

In your site, the menubar is a customizable column along the left of the screen that contains links to numerous collaborative tools. Site leaders have permissions to add, edit, and delete tools with Site Info or Worksite Setup.

Key concepts

Adding tools: A site participant with the appropriate role can modify the content of the site's menubar by adding or subtracting tools using the Site Info tool.

The site owner can choose to display (or hide) most tools in the menubar. Tools available may include the following, and possibly additional tools. Your system administrator controls which tools are available on your system. When new tools become available, or users' needs change, your system administrator can add tools to the system, and then they will appear in the list of tools that you can add to your site.

• Home: This is the course or project site home page. Home can contain a list of recent announcements, discussion items, and chat messages. Also, participants can access Privacy Status, Messages, and Forums notifications here.
  
  
• Announcements: Post current, time-critical information (e.g., to inform users of changes in the schedule or policies of the class).
  
  
• Assignments: Post, submit, and grade online assignments. Your participants can submit assignments electronically for grading and comments.
  
  
• Blogger: Create journals that are available on the web.
  
  
• Chat Room: Hold real-time written discussions with other site participants. Chat is faster and more convenient than waiting for participants to post in the discussion area.
  
  
• Drop Box: Create areas for private file sharing between site leaders and participants.
  
  
• Email Archive: View email sent to the site.
  
  
• Evaluations: OSP Evaluations Tool
  
  
• Forms: OSP Forms Tool
  
  
• Forums: Create discussion forums.
  
  
• Glossary: OSP Glossary Tool
  
  
• Gradebook: Calculate, store, and present grades.
  
  
• Link Tool: Link to external applications.
  
  
• Mailtool: Send mail to groups in your course (attachment-enabled).
  
  
• Matrices: OSP Matrices Tool
  
  
• Messages: Add private messaging to your site.
  
  
• News: Link to RSS newsfeeds.
  
  
• Podcasts: Manage individual podcasts and podcast feed information.
  
  
• Polls: Site leaders can post simple multiple choice polls for voting by site participants.
  
  
• Portfolio Layouts: OSP Layouts Tool
  
  
• Portfolio Templates: OSP Portfolio Templates Tool
  
  
• Portfolios: OSP Portfolios Tool
  
  
• Post'Em: Upload and share .csv files to display feedback (e.g., grades and comments) to site participants.
  
  
• Presentation: Present a slide show of images to many viewers at once, or have them step through the show on their own.
  
  
• Reports: Reports
  
  
• Resources: Upload, store, and share files and URLs.
  
  
• Roster: View the list of site participants.
  
  
• Schedule: Post and view deadlines and events (e.g., class session dates, assignments dates, and cancellations).
  
  
• Search: Search for site content.
  
  
• Section Info: Create official course subgroupings or sections (e.g., labs or recitations) that are revealed in various tools (e.g., Resources).
  
  
• Styles: OSP Style Helper Tool
  
  
• Syllabus: Create and display a course syllabus, or have it point to a pre-existing online syllabus.
  
  
• Tests and Quizzes: Create and deliver tests and surveys.
  
  
• Web Content: Add web page links to the menubar.
  
  
• Wiki: Collaborate with other participants to create and maintain web pages.
  
  
• Wizards: OSP Wizards Tool

Site Info displays information about the site for site participants. Site leaders can use this tool to add participants, edit tools, manage groups, and import files. This tool is part of every site and cannot be deleted from the menubar.

The Help tool has support documentation for all the tools and can contain links to other support resources.

Things to consider

• If your system allows it, create a practice site so that site participants can familiarize themselves with the tools, functions, and options.
  
  
• To avoid the accidental loss of resources, assign roles wisely. Assign roles with broad permissions only to co-instructors and others whom you can trust to edit your site. Everyone else should get a more restricted role, allowing access but not site manipulation. For instance, if another participant removes the Syllabus tool from your site, it will irreversibly remove the syllabus information that you stored there.
  
  
• Users who visit the site will appear in the "Users Present" area until they log out or until their session times out.

Help documentation

For help documentation about the menubar, see Menubar.