Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: Re: Re: Re: Re: Instructions Tab Question

By: Neal Hirsig

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Hi James
Thanks for the response.

I do understand the reasoning behind the 2 instruction sets; however I did find it all a bit confusing. The notion that one would add offline instructions to an online teaching and learning application totally escaped me.

Thanks for the link to the Global Warming lesson and the sequence information form, which I think servers as a great template for some future built-in sequence or lesson instructions.

I noticed that one of the activities in the global warming sequence was having the students collaborate on a PowerPoint presentation. I discovered a way to incorporate this directly into LAMS via Google Docs which has a PowerPoint-like presentation application that can be edited (online) by a group of students. I have a course I use for demo purposes called “Shakespeare’s Birds” and I have created a LAMS activity to demonstrate how this works. It has one activity called Group Presentation which is actually a simple Noticeboard activity with an embedded "iframe" tag.

I created a Google account for the group and set-up the initial pages of a shared presentation. Anyone that accesses the activity can edit the presentation. Once completed (or even in the editing stage) Google provides a read only URL as well; so a Share Resources activity could be placed somewhere later in the sequence to share the presentation with the whole class or a Submit Files activity if it is to be marked and graded.

I have attached the exported LAMS zip file Here . You can import and preview this lesson and try editing it yourself (just follow the directions on the activity page). This can be done with spreadsheets or text documents as well. If the students have their own Google account, there is even no need to create a separate account for the activity. Just a link to the presentation file itself allows anyone (with an account) whom the presentation is shared (for editing purposes) to edit the presentation.

BTW: I attended your excellent presentation at the Sakai Conference in Boston last July. The LAMS Activity Planner is light years ahead of other teaching and learning system concepts. I look forward to working with it.

Neal Hirsig
Tufts University

Posted by Neal Hirsig