From the course: Learning Brightspace by D2L

The D2L content editor - Desire2Learn Tutorial

From the course: Learning Brightspace by D2L

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The D2L content editor

- [Instructor] Most main tools of D2L rely on the text editor for creating content. You're going to see this area for emails, activity descriptions, announcements, dropbox feedback, and a whole host of other things, so it's worth taking some time to explore exactly how this interface behaves. Many of the features are self explanatory like bolding, italicizing, or underlining text, for example. There are, however, some hidden gems within this editor. The first neat thing to point out is this little icon that looks like a chain link and to fully demo this, we're going to need some sample text. Highlight the text you want and then select the chain link. Most people tend to assume that this is simply to setup external hyperlinks, and it can certainly be that if you scroll down here and assign the text to an external URL. However, I tend to enjoy using this feature for creating internal quick links, not external ones. When used in this way, you can connect your sample text to any other kind of content in D2L you've already created. For example, if we want to associate this text with a reading quiz, we just select a category and then the specific quiz, and now any time a user would select this hyperlink, they would be taken immediately to the quiz in question. This kind of internal link can greatly increase the density of course content and make navigation much more accessible. Selecting the dropdown here also allows you to include a range of other things, including a wide variety of symbols, as well as emoticons if you wanna keep things a little bit more lighthearted. You can also make text more accessible by using a table editor. Simply select the number of rows and columns that you'd like and then you can edit text as you see fit. You can also insert rows before or after, or delete a table entirely if you decide you just don't want it anymore. Down here at the bottom of the interface, you can also find spell check, as well as accessibility check features. And if you're feeling particularly adventurous, you can even modify the HTML source code by which this content area behaves, which essentially lets you configure the content area to look like anything you choose. That's a higher level user feature, of course, and requires knowledge of HTML editing, but it's also possible your institution may include a few shortcuts. For example, in the dropdown menu here by the title, you may see an option labeled select document template. These kind of templates have to be pushed out by your institution, but if you see them, they can give you a starting point. Those are just a few ways of interacting with the text editor. As you create various content items, be sure and modify the design and features according to whatever the moment might require.

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