Creating Course Materials

How do you create your course materials? What tools and techniques do you use to develop great content?  What shortcuts have you learned to help speed up course development?  Please tell us.

Idea: Use the anmiation features in PowerPoint

When creating PowerPoint slides it is often helpful to show objects in motion. This is especially helpful in science and engineering courses. The easiest way to learn how it is used is to try it. Select an object (a drawing shape, picture or even text). Go to "Custom Animation" in the menu for PowerPoint. (Since this is found in a different place for each PowerPoint version, you may have to search a bit to find it. It is worth the effort. In PowerPoint 2007 you can find it in the "Animations" tab. )  You will see a new frame dispay on tyhe right of your screen called "Custom Animation". Be sure your object is still selected. Click the "Add Effect" button.

Choose "Entrance if you want the object to enter the screen in a particular way, "Emhasis" if you want to change or move the object after it has entered the slide, "Exit" if you want it to exit the slide in a particular way or "Motion Paths" if you want the object to move on a path. Within each of these there are dozens of options. For instance, you can "Fly In' material to your slide or make it "Fade" in or out. Some of the options can only be found by clicking the "more ..." at the bottom of the selections. Each option also has its own properties which you can see by right-clicking the entry in the box where each animation is displayed.

Idea: Create a video project

Using on-line videos from the web can be very good.  But creating one is much funner.  Creation after all is the highest form of learning.  I have had my students make video presentations/projects before and post them to Youtube.  I think students learn by doing this and enjoy seeing themseleves as part of an online community.  Plus the whole world can now see them as well and learn from their presentations. - Spencer

Idea: Teacher Resources

I like to use the CD-rom that comes with my text book to get idea and outlines for my class. Because I am new to teaching, these have been invaluable to me! They also provide resource ideas, a list of course materials you may need or incorporate, etc. It's great. They also have images from the book that you can copy and paste into powerpoints, (with the proper credit given, of course!) Again, forgot to leave my name yesterday-Tammara Chaffee

Idea: Student CD-rom

In one of my classes I use the student's CD-rom it is full of games for the students to play.  Instead of harping on them to read I have them do three games per chapter, print the results and hand them in.  My grades are much higher this semester with the same tests. -Sheila Fetherlin

IDEA: Use the SAVE AS HTML feature of MS Word.

You don't have to be a Dreamweaver guru to create nice looking web pages. Simply create your content in MS Word and save it as Filtered HTML. Then you can upload your pages to any web site or CMS (WebCT, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, etc.). This is much more efficient than using the html editor in the CMS. I recommend creating a folder on your desktop first that will hold all your course content you create. Then, as you create files and add images, you can keep them all in the folder. Once you are finished, simply zip the folder and upload it to the CMS where you can unzip it and then link your files.

IDEA: Use the export features of Keynote!

Keynote is the Apple answer to Powerpoint. The abilities to export a slide presentation are outstanding. It can be posted to the web in Acrobat pdf format, as an HTML slideshow, or as a Quicktime slide show. My students make great use of these various formats. Posted ahead of time, the students will even print them out in full color and bring them to class. --Bob Paz

IDEA: Use short videos available on web sites.

I used one from the Annie E. Casey foundation about voices of foster children in my graduate class Wednesday night, and it was excellent. I am finding that more and more sites that have a public or professional education component are including video clips. It's not exactly creating your own materials, just thinking about ways to use the materials that other people have created. Jody Crowley

IDEA:  Photostory from MS

My idea is to download photo story from MS, it is a still image tool that allows the user to put in the image and narrate their comments as the pictures move along.  In addition music can be added.  Once the assignment, course, is done the educator can upload it to the desired course.  This is a nice tool that can be used with windows media player.  This tool is great for small orientation presentations or assigments.  Conni D. 

IDEA: Use the SAVE AS HTML feature in MS Word to generate image files

I wanted to use images in the WebCT quiz tool that I had created using the drawing tools in MS Word. I found the easiest way was to save the entire document as web page. This creates a folder that includes all drawings as indiviual gif files. I did rename those files from a generic number to something more meaningful and then uploaded them.

Mathtype equation objects are also treated as images when saving a MS Word file as webpage. As an alternative Mathtype itself allows to 

"save copy as ...gif" also, so you can include any equation object into a webpage or the quiz tool when you treat them as images. (Michaela B.)

IDEA: Use PDFs

I think it important that everyone teaching online has Adobe Professional. HTML is okay for some applications but does not always print well. Posting assignments in Word may be a problem because not all students have Word. I found I have less problems if I post everything in PDF. Most computers have Adobe Reader , if not it is an easy download. Trying to get converters is much more difficult. Beth G

IDEA: Use Animoto

I created a video for the beginning of a module using Animoto.  This is a fun way to get the students ingaged quickly and peak their interest of the upcoming unit of study.  Animoto is free for you to create a 15 second video.  You can use up to 15 pictures and any music they offer or you can use music of your own remembering the copywrite issues. 

Jackie

I like Jackie's idea of using Animoto. I have taken a quick look at it and it seems that it would be interesting to work with this and especially good for visual learners. I would like to try it in my class.

As a Government Documents librarian I like to take users to web sites and NARA videos that are accessible, cataloged through our library and freely available on the web. There are quite a few Government Documents resources that have nice visuals for learning, such as the Library of Congress American Memory site. There are also sound files in these collections that are fun to access. An example is this Blues/Gospel music

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftvhtml/ftvhome.html

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