HTML and Yola

This new class I'm in at CSUEB is crazy busy. This week we coded and HTML page, created a quiz and a survey and created and put up a website. Luckily, I've done most of this before, although it's been a few years. Refreshers never hurt and I always learn something new. If you want to view my new website its at http://academic-cybrarian.synthasite.com/ . I used Yola which was really easy to set up and navigate.

A pile of Information Literacy books

Thanks to MelCat, I have a hoard of information literacy books on my desk right now all published in the last 5 years. They cover topics such as: assessment, integrating IL into higher ed curriculum, strategies for teaching IL online, and building an IL program. The one that has quickly become my favorite is "Teaching Information Literacy: A Conceptual Approach" by Christy Gavin (2008). Christy is the coordinator of Instructional Services at California State University - Bakersfield (which is incidentally part of the University system where I am working towards my MSEd-OTL). Her chapters are relevant and logical with many exercises and examples included. The first chapter on selecting an narrowing topics is especially well done with a discussion about brainstorming, classifying and clustering. Gavin approaches it in a way that enables the instructor to interact more fully with the students which is always a good thing. Several of the chapters go more in depth than I do for my sessions. Even in my personal research I hardly ever use some of the complicated search strategies that are proposed. However, it's good to have them on hand in case a needful situation ever arose. I will definitely buy this one to add to my collection.

Photobucket saves the day!

I couldn't get my SWF converted successfully so I found a site that can host SWF.
Here's the link:
Database Tutorial

The adventure of creating tutorials

For some time I've played around with screencasting software. I started with WINK because it is free and my institution doesn't provide software tools like this. WINK kept crashing though and it was hard to work with. I tried to use it to capture a website usability study, but I think the files were just too large for my system. Anyway, I put it aside for a while. In the last week or so I downloaded a trial of Adobe Captivate and I love it so far. It's so easy to work with, but I only have access to it for 28 more days...The other problem is that it creates a .SWF file, but I can't upload that to the website, even YouTube and Blogger won't take it unless it is converted into an MPEG or AVI. So.... I downloaded the free version of Sothink's SWF Converter, but it will only let me convert 9 seconds of the tutorial! Sheesh! I did convert it into a PDF, but I can't upload a PDF either apparently. There's got to be a way to do this!