Teaching Resources and Quick Tips
- Teaching Resources
- Blogs
- MOOs
- Project Achieve’s Teacher Guide
- Web pages
- Composer
I will not attempt to cover all the possible combinations of available resources, but there are a few things I’ve garnered about the tools I do use which might be helpful to others.
Blogs have grown both in popularity and study, and there is currently a ton of material available both online and off about this technology. If you need a starting point or a beginner’s introduction, start here.
MOOs have a much lower profile than blogs, but they have incredible potential. Please note that while Project Achieve is not currently up and running, the Teacher’s Guide we used with our instructors may prove useful to others.
There are a variety of e-mail software available these days, but the dominant programs in use at the moment seem to be Eudora, Outlook, AOL, and Netscape, while free e-mail tends to be dominated by Yahoo! and Hotmail. My personal preference is for Eudora, in part for its flexibility and power, but also because most viruses aren’t designed to use the software to spread themselves; like a roach motel, most bugs may check in, but they can’t easily check out.
Hotmail is problematic with Blackboard; it doesn’t like the empty recipient field Blackboard software generates.
AOL is problematic with almost everything. While AOL is handy for those who’re beginning to introduce themselves to the Internet or need access from a variety of geographic locations, most student users aren’t skilled enough to be able to change their e-mail preferences and settings to allow them the flexibility they need for certain operations. For instance, image and html files are automatically embedded within the mail rather than attached, and that can be problematic if you need an assignment turned in as its own file. More problematically, AOL has a tendency to bounce incoming mail from a user’s account at odd intervals. The event doesn’t seem to be linked with a user’s quota since AOL still allows the user to continue to receive mail originating from AOL or AOL-affiliated addresses. The problem, however, is that the user doesn’t know when the event happens; there’s no notification or warning—the individual simply stops receiving all non-AOL mail. Unfortunately, most people don’t realize they have a problem before a few days have passed, and in an online course, those few days may be critical. As a secondary note, if you haven’t already discovered it, AOL’s browser doesn’t cope well with Java-intensive pages or applications (e.g., Blackboard, web-based MOOs, etc.). Typically, it only displays a portion of the page’s content and borks applications.
While most students have school e-mail addresses, it can be helpful for them to have a secondary account in the event of a system failure or problem. If they opt for Yahoo!, have them change the privacy options in order to reduce the amount of spam the account will encourage.
In addition to Yahoo!, Hotmail, and GMail, Eudora has a free webmail service at .
As a reminder, regardless of the e-mail software, make it a rule that your students sign their mails to you, or you’ll be deluged with mail from a host of unrecognizable aliases and addresses.
Web pages
A number of distance (and face-to-face) courses are including web projects as course assignments. For students who’ve had some experience making pages or understand the most basics of how web pages work, the assignment may be intimidating but isn’t usually overwhelming. For those, however, who’ve had no experience at all and are not as computer savvy as we’d like—and there are more of them than we like to believe—the assignment can be a source of major stress, particularly when you tell them that they cannot make their page using Word or Word Perfect. (Word is particularly nasty about embedding miles of unnecessary code which both inflates the file and plays havoc with page layout and display.)
As an aside, if you’re making your own pages, neither should you use Word or Word Perfect to make those pages. Saving a document in .html format is not an option if you expect that page to be a normal sized file, display properly, or have a chance of displaying relatively similarly for all of your students. Take the precaution of viewing any pages you make in as many browsers as you can; remember that they do show pages differently, and it’ll do you no good to make a page that looks beautiful in one browser if half your students can’t read it in the browser they use.
The majority of student page-making experience is with Front Page, Netscape’s Composer, and programs like Geocities’s online software, not necessarily in that order. If the focus of the exercise is not on the code itself, the easiest WYSIWYG program currently available is Netscape’s Composer. It’s not perfect and has some odd glitches and awkward code handling now and again, but it’s relatively self-explanatory, bears a strong resemblance to the word processing software students are already familiar with, and is very user friendly. A simple cheat sheet is usually enough to acclimate students to the software, and because the software is free, there’s no additional expense.
Online Teacher’s Guide Table of Contents:
Be Practical
Be Prepared
Get Personal
Self-Preservation
Teaching Resources
Blog Resources
MOO Resources
A Warning