ACTVF Course Sites Set Up

andrew's picture
Submitted by andrew(1661)August 10, 2011 - 12:56pm

Howdy ACTVF gang,

Mark had me create a standard course site template and generate a copy for each of your courses.   These have been shared with you and linked off of this ACTVF online course directory.

Please go in to the course sites that have been assigned to you and get familiar with the layout and begin customizing / adding content to them.   If I understand correctly, our goal is to complete the syllabus and build out resources for at least one unit.

Best,

Andrew

Challenges:

Comments

cdowty
cdowty1 year 40 weeks ago

Managing the site

Hi Andrew, I've been messing around with the template - trying some of the challenges you put to us and all.  I notice when I go to "manage site" there isn't any option for changing the site layout or general information. Is that deliberate? If so, how can I go about adding items to my sidebar?

andrew
andrew1 year 40 weeks ago

All should now have "owner" access to your sites

Thanks for pointing this out.  It should have been fixed as of yesterday morning.

Cary.E.Riina
Cary.E.Riina1 year 40 weeks ago

Standardization Question

Dear Andrew,

Is the idea that the sites are to be laid out by subject area and not by instructor? If so, how on the sites can we show different course policies that different teachers have. For instance, I know that I have a different homework policy than another math teacher who teaches the same course as me. How can I have the site reflect this?

Thanks,

Cary Riina

andrew
andrew1 year 40 weeks ago

How to handle multiple teachers in the same course

Mark suggested that this would be handled by creating multiple course pages and naming them differently, either with a number or using the teacher name and then reducing the number of section calendars to refect the number of sections you teach.   E.g. Algebra - Riina (section 1 and 2) would have a separate site from Algebra- Smith (section 3).

That said, it probably makes sense for teachers of the same subject to strive for some uniformity.   Not sure what Mark's position is on teachers of the same subject having very different grading policies.  You will have to work with him on this.

Cary.E.Riina
Cary.E.Riina1 year 40 weeks ago

Uniformity, with slight differences

We definitely have a lot of uniformity (especially in grading policy - our whole department uses the same grading policy), but there are differences between teachers' methods (i.e. both grade homework as 20% of the course grade, however one collects it daily and grades for correctness, the other spot checks). So when I asked about this, I am not really asking about large differences in grading policy, just smaller differences in teacher methods. It would be awkward for a student to read that their homework will be collected every day and then not have it collected. It seems like the organization you outlined above would definitely work well and would avoid any confusion regarding different teachers having slightly different methods/expectations.

andrew
andrew1 year 40 weeks ago

New handy URLs for ACTVF Google services

All,

Happy to report that Hyung Kim succeeded in changing the DNS settings for your domain so that you now have the following very handy links.

http://mail.actvf.org points to your email login / inbox

http://docs.actvf.org points to your docs area

http://sites.actvf.org points to the beta academic dashboard and course directory

http://video.actvf.org points to the ACTVF video collection

http://calendar.actvf.org points to your calendars

Thanks Hyung for sorting this out!

Cheers,

Andrew

epierce
epierce1 year 39 weeks ago

Replicating Calendars

Hi Andrew,

I am the only person teaching non-AP US History and I created a detailed calendar for one section of my US History course.  Is there a way for me to replicate or copy this calendar into the other sections to start out the year?

 

Thanks

 

andrew
andrew1 year 39 weeks ago

Copying a Google calendar

While you can copy individual events from one calendar to another (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMe73cD2mCI), copying whole calendars is a bit trickier, and involved exporting and then importing the calendar events into another calendar.

See http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/topic.py?topic=15285 for guidance.

FYI We are close to having a custom gadget built for ACTVF that will allow you to quickly post an assignment into multiple section calendars at once, each with different due dates if you  want...I will update when we have this finalized.

andrew
andrew1 year 39 weeks ago

New screencast on ACTVF site setup

I've posted a new video that is specific to the setup of the actual ACTVF course site I built in consultation with Mark, walking through the customization and setup of the template.  If you follow the steps in the video, you should end up with all the gadgets pointing to the right location, etc.   The video is geared towards a beginner-intermediate Google Apps user...

http://www.youpd.org/content/set-common-google-sites-course-template-your-school

Cary.E.Riina
Cary.E.Riina1 year 37 weeks ago

Some Questions for Andrew

1. Andrew, you mentioned before when I asked about standardization, that the sites might be designed so that they are teacher specific, i.e. Geometry-Cary, Geometry-Eric, etc. As I am designing the "Geometry" website, I am realizing that I am having to be very deliberatively non-specific with regard to the differences between how different teachers insruct their classes. Is it still in the plans to do teacher specific sites? Should I generate the current "Geometry" site to be a general/editable geometry template with only the specifics missing or should I try to design it to house all of the geometry classes?

2. Andrew, earlier in this forum you mentioned that a feature was being developed for calendars. I have avoided creating the site calendars in anticipation of this feature. Any word on this feature? Also, what level of detail is expected on the calendars and finally how far in advance should the details be included on the calendar?

 

andrew
andrew1 year 37 weeks ago

Response to Cary's Sites Q's

Cary et al,

1) Not sure I understand you correctly: It sounds in part like you (and others) want more lattitude to design the Geometry site to accomodate the needs of your courses?   From my sense of Mark's priorities, the only parts he cares about being uniform are the structure of the syllabus and the elements of the unit overview.  It is fully expected that you will change the look, feel, and structure of your course site to suit your needs, provided you do the basics of the aforementioned sections .  If you have built out somthing that could be useful to a colleague teaching the same courese and wanted to make a copy of your site in its still-non-specific form for your colleague to use, that would be a great idea!  You can just copy a site without making a template.  This is done from "Manage this site -> General"

2) The calendar script will give you a gadget to add assignment with a title, a description, and  a links to a URL resource to multiple calendars in one shot.  The beta for the script is done and I'm having the developer create a short screencast with instructions on how to install it.  This should be available early this week!  As for how you assign work to kids, this is none of my business;)  Mark has suggested he wants students and parents to be able to rely on their Google calendars as due date calendars.   In my experience there are lots of time-saving ways to input assignments, particularly if you have many repeating structures, like weekly quizzes, nightly homework, or packets.   For example, you could set up a repeating assignment for each section and include a link to a master spreadsheet where you list out all the nightly homework details by assignment number... 

Cary.E.Riina
Cary.E.Riina1 year 37 weeks ago

Thanks

Thanks for the answers! They are really helpful!