3.4. Effective Content PracticesThere are a few effective practices that can make life easier for you and your students. First, there are file format tricks to ensure your students can download and use your content. Second, make sure the bit size of your files is as small as it can be so your students won't grow old waiting to download tomorrow's lecture notes. Third, there are creative ways to use static content in your courses to help you and your students succeed. 3.4.1. File FormatsEvery file you create and save on your computer has a specific file format. For example, Word files are saved in Word format, and can be opened only in a compatible version of Word. However, this can cause problems if your students don't have the same version of Word you do. A solution is to continue to create your documents in Word but save them as Rich Text Format, or RTF , a format that can be opened by a wide variety of word processing programs. In most versions of Word, you can save a file as RTF by following these steps:
There are a number of file formats for displaying text and images that almost everyone can open, regardless of their computing platform, and you should strive to use these whenever possible. These formats include RTF, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML ), Postscript Display Format (PDF), and picture formats, including pict, tiff, jpeg, gif, and png. Table 3-2 describes some common file formats.
3.4.2. Reducing File SizesEqually important to creating files your students can open is getting them to a manageable size. Usually, graphics are the biggest offenders, and they crop up in some unlikely places. There are three strategies that will give you the best results for the effort. 3.4.2.1. Strategy 1: Save your PowerPoint presentations as RTFIn my experience, big PowerPoint files are the worst file size offenders. It's easy to add cool transitions, clip art, and images that will cause a simple hour-long presentation to balloon into a multi-megabyte behemoth that will take an hour to download. Not a good use of time for something that students will simply print out and bring to class. I strongly recommend saving your slides as an RTF text outline. Students will get the benefits of the outline of the lecture and be able to use them to take notes, but the file will be quick and easy to download and viewable in a wide range of applications. Outline format is a text format. You'll lose all of your nifty transitions and the images in the presentation. But the advantages of a quick download and having an outline for note taking usually outweigh the lost information. If you have important images or diagrams in the presentation, add them to your Moodle course separately. Students can then download them individually if they choose. To save your PowerPoint as RTF:
3.4.2.2. Strategy 2: Scan articles as text, not imagesThere are many good articles that just aren't available in electronic format. If you want to avoid printing an entire reader, scanning articles is an easy way to give your students access to important resources. Many libraries now have electronic reserve services that will scan them for you. Scanning articles can result in very large files because most scanner software, by default, scans everything as a graphic. So when you scan a page, you're really creating a picture of the page that is much larger than a text version. The computer has to store information about every dot on the page, not just information about the characters and their placement on the page. The solution is to use a software tool called Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. This great tool recognizes the shape of the letters and gives you a text version of the article. You can then manipulate the text version in the same way you'd edit any other text document. It has the added advantage of being accessible to screen readers for students with visual disabilities. OCR software is probably available somewhere on your campus. OmniPage Pro is currently the most popular OCR package. It's come a long way in the last few years and is now very powerful. If you have a relatively clean photocopy of the articles you want to share, scanning them will be a very fast process. 3.4.2.3. Strategy 3: Reduce your image size and use compressionFinally, if you have digital images, it's very important to optimize their size and resolution for sharing over the Web. Modern digital cameras and scanners can produce amazing, crystal-cear images, but at a price of very large file sizes. A full resolution photograph in a modern camera can be 4 megabytes, which will take more than 5 minutes to download on a 56k modem. Most cameras and scanners come with free utilities that enable you to manipulate images. Other programs such as Photoshop are fully featured, professional packages with lots of tools. To reduce your file size, you only need some very simple tools that most image-manipulation software provides. The key to getting manageable images is to first reduce the size of the image. If your image will be primarily viewed on the screen, you can make it 72 dpi and it will still be viewable. If you plan to have your students print the image, then it will need to be higher resolution. Experiment with some different sizes and resolutions to get a result you're happy with. When your image is the right size, save it at the minimum quality as a web-compatible format such as jpeg or gif. These formats will make your file size even smaller by eliminating unnecessary and redundant data. By reducing the size of your files, you'll make life easier for yourself and your students. But the smallest, most portable files in the world don't mean much if your students can't use them successfully in your class. Next, we'll discuss some interesting ways you can use content to make your Moodle class a valuable resource for your students. 3.4.3. Creative ContentMoodle allows you to upload just about any file that resides on your computer. However, the key to a successful content strategy is knowing what content helps your students be successful, and what content is unnecessary or confusing. Below are two best practices for adding content to your course. These practices work well in a range of course designs, but there are other practices that might work just as well for your particular course. 3.4.3.1. Uploading lecture notesOne of the easiest ways to use Moodle to increase student learning is to upload your lecture notes before the lecture. Providing access to your lecture outlines before a class meeting gives your students a tool to prepare for class and structure their class notes. If students know which topics you consider important enough to include in your lecture, they are more likely to pay attention to those areas in any assigned readings. During class, they can use the lecture notes as a base outline and concentrate on elaborating the main ideas with examples. Lecture notes are also a useful tool for students whose first language is different from that of the speaker. If they get lost during a lecture, they can refer to the notes to get back on track. If you use PowerPoint in your lectures, a simple way to create and upload lecture notes is to save your slides as an RTF file. This will eliminate graphics and other extras and provide the students with a plain-text outline. It will be easy to download and print for class. 3.4.3.2. External web sitesEffectively using the Web means you don't have to create or photocopy everything you want to use in your class. There is a lot of quality content available on the Web, if you know where to look and how to evaluate it. A full discussion about vetting online resources is beyond the scope of this book, but your institution's librarian can recommend some sources to get your started. Most newspapers and news magazines have online versions you can bring into your class for discussions of current events. Universities, schools, and non-profit organizations publish huge amounts of content available for you to use free of charge. Here are a couple of good sites where you can begin your search for other sites:
This list is by no means exhaustive. Simply using Google as a tool in your class would vastly expand the amount and variety of content available to your students. |