Excerpts from the Handbook

Overview for the Student:

Student Presentations enables one student or a group of students to create a presentation and upload it to their WebCT course. To enable the class to view your presentation at any time, you must create an HTML file. The final document must be titled index.html. Other files in the group folder are not public unless linked to the index.html file. These additional files are usually pictures or graphs in a .gif or .jpg format.

If the group does not want the class to see its work while in progress then do not title your final project index.html until you are ready to go public. You can call it something like draftindex.html and it will not be public, but at least your group will know which file is supposed to be the final presentation.

Students can upload any type of file into the group folder including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations or movie and sound files. However, these files will not be viewable by your class. Your group members can edit or delete them.

Within the file storage area, you will see an option to edit your file. It is not recommended to edit here for two reasons:

1. Unless you know HTML very well, it is very confusing in this view.
2. When you edit here, it will over store someone else's work.

Potential problems for students include over storing each other's edits. To prevent two or more people from editing the same file and then uploading it and over storing the original and creating all kinds of confusion, the authors recommend that the instructor give the students some advice on how to use the group folder and exchange files without overwriting each other's work. There are three very simple instructions to help you avoid this from happening:

1. Have each student create a sub-folder with his/her name. Then instruct each student to only upload files into his/her named sub-folder.
2. Always change the name of any document when you make changes to it. A simple method is to add a generation number to the file. For instance, summary.doc would become summary1.doc, then summary2.doc and so on. This simple measure can save the group plenty of headaches.
3. Assign only one group member to the task of project editor. This person is responsible for coordinating all edits to the group project. This job can rotate on a weekly or monthly basis among the group members to keep from putting too much of a burden on any one group member.

"How To's" for Students: Student View of the Student Presentations Tool

• If the course has the Mail Tool, you can click on the Mail icon to e-mail members of your group
• The Group column contains the names of the different groups. By clicking on a group name, you can see who belongs to the group.
• If you see [Edit Files], it means you are a member of that group. By clicking on the [Edit Files] hyperlink you enter your group's file area.
• The index.html file is displayed as a hyperlink in the Project column. Clicking on a hyperlink launches the presentation.
  How other students access the presentation
  
  
  

Note that every member of a group will have access to the group's files, so the group will need to decide how it is going to manage this access so that members are not overwriting each other's work. Three suggestions:

1. Create a folder for each group member and you only work on the files in your folder.
2. Select one person in the group to manage the files and editing
3. Add a generation number to any file a member edits and uploads, e.g. summary1.doc, summary2.doc, etc.

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