Day 2

Welcome to the Learning4Content Facilitator's Guide

Building capacity for open education together

Home  |  Preparations  |  Participants  |  Venue and Facilities  |  Before the Workshop  |  Day 1  |  Day 2  |  Day 3  |  After the Workshop  | 

This Facilitators Guide to Learning4Content Workshops is a work in progress.

Day Two workshop objectives and schedule

This is only a suggested schedule. You will have to customise it to suit the needs of your particular group of trainees. Also, you maybe have your own preferred style and techniques. Please remember, you are welcome to add to this Facilitator's Guide and improve it!

Day two is a day of consolidation, building on basic editing skills and gaining confidence.

The general objectives for day two are given below.

Objectives

Objectives

You can be happy if at the end of day 2: Everyone has created a User Page, and has entered content about themselves, using a variety of formats including: Headers Bullets and numbered lists Bold and italics Indents You have trained the participants how to add and format images, and they have successfully managed to add images to their pages Via the quality activity or otherwise, they have learned how to use the discussion page when collaborating and communicating Everyone is confident with regard to logging on, locating their user page and sandbox, and the Workshop page They have learned how to add pedagogical templates, and have practiced using them in the sandboxes. Everyone has decided the titles of their content pages and have created a link to a new page, in readiness for Day 3 You have the participants page updated with User Page links

Schedule

Suggested timings only.

Time	Activity
08:45	Arrive, log on and settle down
09:00	Recap and summary - What we have learned so far
09:30	Activity: Introduction to collaboration - feedback on quality (Lesson 8)
10:00	Editing and building user pages
10:30	Tea / Coffee
10:45	Lesson 6 - Images and Media Continue editing user pages
12:30	Lunch Break
13:30	Lesson 9 - Pedagogical templates Continue editing user pages
15:30	Tea / Coffee
15:45	Creating content pages Continue editing user pages

Recap and summary

Go over What we have learned so far. This is really important, as new users may have forgotten some things they learned the previous day.

• Creating accounts and logging on. Make sure all are able to log on and locate their User Page.
• Creating a new page by adding a link. Make sure they are clear of the syntax.
• Using a sandbox as a practice area. Make sure they can move between their User Page and Sandbox and understand what each are for.
• Basic text formatting. Remind them of their Cheatsheet (handout), prompt them for each syntax as below, and write on the white board the basic formats
  • Bold
  • Italic
  • Numbered and bullet lists
  • Headings
  • Indents
  • New page
  • Effect of adding a space in front of some text, with no markup (creates a text box)
• Ask them what they can remember about the use of a forward slash when adding a link, and remind them of the flat and hierarchical structure of the wiki again
• Remind them of the text toolbar, but do not encourage them to use it yet (explain that they need to know the basics first).
• Ask them if they have tried mixed numbered and bullet lists (give some examples)
• Show them the automatic index that appears when multiple headers are used, and how subheadings affect it. This is very useful to aid understanding of headers formatting.
• External links. If this was not covered on Day 1, do it now. You can put up on the screen / whiteboard the following three formats and they can then type into their sandboxes to discover the results:
  • http://www.google.com
  • [http://www.google.com]
  • [http://www.google.com This is an external link]
• Give them 15 minutes to settle down and try a few things out in their sandboxes.

What we will do today

Go over the objectives and schedule for the day (as above), which are mainly concerning the creation of a user page and consolidation of basic text skills, plus learning some new tricks. At this point, ensure they all have their completed registration forms; if not, they can fill them in during tea break.

Show them your user page, and/or others such as Wayne Mackintosh's. Explain that they will be creating their own similar page about themselves. This is usually motivating.

Using collaboration tools to enter feedback from the debate on quality

If you have followed the suggestion described end of Day 1, you can now launch into the Activity below. This is an introduction to collaboration and is effectively bringing forward Lesson 8.

You will have previously set up a link to a new page where each group can add their feedback. See the L4C11 workshop page for example.

Activity

Introduction to collaboration and communication on the Wikieducator: Feedback on the Quality Debate Reform the groups from Day 1. Show them where their feedback page is (access from workshop page). Groups decide who will be the person responsible to maintain the page where the collective feedback will be inserted The others use the discussion page to add their comments and expand and debate their feedback

Additional things to point out to participants

In addition to the standard Lessons, you can point out and demonstrate the following during the day, when a suitable occasion arises.

• Using the search tool, for instance:
  • Type the workshop code i.e. L4C11 to locate the workshop page
  • Type "All iDevices" to GO straight to a list of all pedagogical templates
  • Type "Tutorials" to GO straight to the online tutorials
• Using Open Office "mediawiki" export facility (works in versions 2.3 and higher). A good example to use is the participants' table - most likely you will have a spreadsheet sent by the organisers. If you first copy/paste that into Open Office Writer, and then show them how much easier it is to export and paste the resulting wiki markup into the wiki than to create a table in the wiki from "first principles". Remind them to use the format tools in Open Office or these will not show up in the wiki code.
• Pick some great examples of OERs in the Content section and illustrate to them what is possible. For instance:
  • University of Otago has some good content
  • The Malaria guides in the Technical section
  • The 57 lesson plans for biology teachers in elementary schools
• Downloading as PDF, using the toolbox on the left menu pane. Explain that you will also demonstrate Collections and exporting in HTML on Day 3.
• Inserting HTML. You can at that point introduce the use of the <br> tag to force new lines. Think of a few other examples, or even copy some HTML from a popular HTML editor such as Front Page.
• How they can always learn more, and copy nice formats they see on an page in the wiki by simply copy/pasting the markup code. This can be done by editing (but not saving) or viewing source on the appropriate page.
• The My Preferences link at the top right, and where they can change their email address and their preferences for their user account

Editing and building user pages

Most of the Day 2 will be spent developing their user pages. Make sure they have their registration forms, which provide some headings and content that they can quickly type in, and this will help them to get the idea. Usually participants will want to build and embellish their user pages, enjoying being creative. Encourage this, and monitor each participant, giving support and tips/extra information throughout the day.

Lesson 6 - Images and Media

Follow the lesson guides, and remind participants they can refer to their printed notes. The lesson requires them to upload some images. This may be easy if they are using their own computers, or are fairly skilled and know how to access some digital photographs such as their own photos. Quite often people carry these around on Mp4 players or mobile phones.

Otherwise, you can show them how to search for images on the Wikimedia Commons repository of open digital resources. This has the added benefit of learning about publishing open resources, and the fact that they can't just use any images without knowing the licenses under which they are published.

They can also take their own portraits using your, or their own camera.

Important note: Make sure they understand about image size, and how to tell how large (in KB or MB) an image is, before they download or upload it. If their computers have simple image processing software (such as Picture Manager in the Microsoft Office Tools menu) briefly demonstrate how to use that to resize any existing photographs they wish to use in their wiki pages.

I have found that this will take a good hour or two, until they all have experienced downloading images, inserting links, and exploring the options for type, position, size and caption.

---

Feedback:

Idea: Write the basic syntax for image on the board. It is useful to explain the logic of the syntax. Ask Why is the syntax for an image similar to that for a new link?

The answer is, of course, that when we insert an image we are creating a link to an existing image on the Wikieducator. If the link appears red, that is the same as when they created links to new pages : they can infer that it simply means the image does not yet exist on the Wikieducator.

People might also ask if they can link to external images. Explain that this is not usually done, and how licensing might be an issue if they did.

Lesson 9 - Pedagogical templates

This lesson is fairly easy to do. Participants will get the idea quite readily. It is not necessary to use the slide show, but decide for yourself if the particular group may benefit from the additional reinforcement of their learning that it might provide.

If you have used templates to prompt activities on day 1, they will already be anticipating this lesson keenly.

The following procedure usually works quite well.

1. Show some examples, such as these pages of the Facilitator's guide, and some you have identified in the Content section of the Wikieducator.
2. Explain that these are called Pedagogical Templates, but that they are also iDevices
3. Refer them to their printed lesson guides for Lesson 9, which also lists some iDevices.
4. Show them how to navigate to a full list of all the iDevices by typing "All iDevices" in the search tool and clicking GO

They can then practice in their sandboxes. Some additional features to mention:

• The title of the iDevice must be typed exactly and it is case sensitive; i.e. {{OBJECTIVES|}} will not give the expected results.
• They must nest the content of the template inside the curly brackets. It is good to make the brackets first, add some space/blank lines and then then type in the content.
• They can use bullet points and other text formats in the content

Give some examples, and demonstrate the above on the screen, as they go ahead and try it out for themselves.

---

Feedback:

If the group is quite advanced, you can then give some additional feedback on how templates work in the wiki:

• Templates are used to provide "dynamic content", or repeated content that is needed on a set of wiki pages
• Templates are wiki pages themselves; when a link to a template is added, it draws in content from the special template page
• You can do some nice things with menus, using HTML, etc
• Show the template used in this facilitator's guide as an example, and show them the Template page that it uses

Creating content pages - their contributions to L4C

In the last session of the day, you should focus on getting everyone started on their content pages.

Objectives

The objectives of this session are: To decide what OER they wish to create Deciding on a page title Adding a link to the top of their user page and creating the new page ready for Day 3

The important issues are:

• To help them to decide what to create. They can do something related to their work, which is ideal as it makes their training immediately relevant and prompts them to continue learning and using the WE afterwards
• To choose a good title. Remind them not to use dots, slashes, hyphens etc, and that it is case sensitive. Remind them again that if they want the page to be in the main flat structure of the Wikieducator, it must be a unique name. For instance Lesson Plan would be a bad choice as many other Wkieducator trainees may have used it. They need to use something specific, like Lesson Plan for XYZ for Primary Schools in PNG.

Try and ensure that by the end of he day, they all have a valid link at the top of their user pages.

Finally, you can now add the content page links to the participant's table in the workshop home page.

End of Day Summary

Summarise what they have learned, and congratulate them on how far they have come already. Briefly explain what they will do on Day 3:

• Add content to their new pages
• Have provided their first example of OER and joined the world of Open Educational Resources
• Completing Lesson 7 - page history, reverting
• Lesson 11 - learning about open licenses and related issues
• Additional advanced features such as Collections

Home  |  Preparations  |  Participants  |  Venue and Facilities  |  Before the Workshop  |  Day 1  |  Day 2  |  Day 3  |  After the Workshop  |