TCS Instructional Design

Below is an excellent blog post from 1stwebdesigner.com detailing the functional use of Dropbox in a professional milieu. To view the post from their website, head over to http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/dropbox-tips-and-tricks/

Hey all, so quite a while ago I was wondering how to embed Google Calendars into a course. At the time I had no SMEs who were interested in integrating (alliteration) such a thing into their courses. But now I have a couple who are asking me to do this for them. It is actually an incredibly easy process, and the end result is very professional. I decided to create a screencast for my SMEs (who are jointly collaborating on a couple of Fall courses), and am going to embed it below:

This is a simple post. We discussed flash CS4 professional during today's L&L. I decided to start from scratch and go through the tutorial again with you guys via a screencast. So go ahead and get your hands dirty. (FYI, I had to break down the video into two parts) Part I   Part II

I just wanted to put up a recap of what I went over yesterday. This should be useful for Nicole and Gia, who didn't make it for that portion, as well as for anyone who would like to go over that again. The short description of my portion yesterday was that there are a wealth of resources and materials built right into PowerPoint that most people don't know about (or they don't realize the possibilities available). We are able to take what is given to us and modify it and truly make it our own.

This will be a nice and easy post to get through. Even Mark might enjoy this one! I thought that I should just share a couple of little computer-related things to make your life slightly easier every now and then. Let's start with the Windows Task Manager—you know, that guy you pull up whenever something starts freezing and you want to shut it down quickly? How do you specifically pull up the task manager? That's right, you probably press [Ctrl + Alt + Delete], wait for a bunch of options to come up, and then choose the task manager from the options. Well guess what? Just press [Ctrl + Shift + Esc] , and the task manager will pop up much quicker! Try it. Also, you know how sometimes you are rapidly churning out some document and you type a mistake, but you are typing so fast that you've already typed another 2-3 words? That really stinks, because the mistake was just close enough the where the cursor is that you don't want to bother wasting time to gra...

Some of my favorite things about this thing called the world wide interweb are the lecture-based websites like TED, Fora.tv, and RSA. A few years ago, RSA pioneered this concept of accompanying short lectures with whiteboard drawings. It is now a common technique used by the likes of apple, dropbox, etc., in order to demonstrate their "innovative" products. Anyway, I thought that I would share my top five ID-related(ish) RSAnimates with you all. Enjoy!

Okay, this post really will be short and sweet. This is a tip that I learned very recently while collaborating with a SME. Like many or (hopefully) all of you have already done, this SME signed up for an account with dropbox. She downloaded the program onto her work computer and promptly began loading up important documents for the class we are working on together into one of her folders. Then she emailed me and gave me her username and password so that I could access the files. I promptly emailed her back and told her that it would probably be best if she never disseminated that information to anyone. Instead I gave her instructions on how she can simply "share" her folder with me so that I could have access. It is incredibly easy to share dropbox folders, and it is much more preferable than emailing back and forth all the time. This also ensures that as long as she makes changes to the file that is in the dropbox folder, then I will have access to the latest docu...

Yea, I know that it has been a while since the last post. I've been busy lately! Anyway, this one will be very short and sweet and perhaps moderately useful every once in a while. We will discuss how to modify the properties of a horizontal rule <hr>. <hr>'s have been revered as rogue html elements for many years now. They don't behave well and often when styled they appear differently based on which browser you are using. So why bother even learning this, you ask? And I answer: I don't know. So let's get into it, shall we? In days past, you could actually style <hr>'s using pure html. You could type something like <hr size="5px" width="90%" align="center"> and it would actually render. But that is all deprecated now. As is becoming the trend with everything web-design related in terms of formatting, you'll want to switch over to CSS for that stuff. Let's begin exploring the possibiliti...

What up? I have a couple of CSS gems I wanted to share with you. This first one is called a top shadow. Here is the effect: Compare this version to the not so fun version: Here is the code for that little effect: Another little gem is putting a drop shadow under images. Here is a screenshot within eCollege with two images, one has a drop shadow: If you like that shadow as it is, then use this code: Okay, now stay with me. That code should put a drop shadow on all images on the page (if you have multiple images). The code is essentially saying that whereever there is an <img>, then the browser is to apply those settings. You can also put drop shadows on <div>s if you would like. Just change the img { … } so that it reads If you want some pictures to have shadows and not others, then create a class. In the above example I had the two pictures and for the sake of illustrating the drop shadow, I wanted one to have the shadow and the oth...

Okay, onto the final half of the CSS button tutorial. This part will deal with the code (CSS and HTML) and is quite easy. You will need two pieces of code for this to work. The CSS portion can be found here . The HTML portion is simply (button text) And on to the video part of the instruction. Again I would suggest watching this in fullscreen at 720p HD :  

This is part 1 of what I wanted to get through during the Lunch and Learn this week. I decided to start from scratch so that everyone can follow along from the beginning, and I tried to be as thorough and as brief as possible. This is really kind of an intermediate tutorial, but you should be able to follow along without any problems and do the steps to come up with a good product. *note: you'll want to blow this up to full screen and watch in 720p HD

Hey all, last month I was trying to work with the eCollege tech guys in coming up with a way for us to stream video in our courses locally, instead of having to rely on Youtube or Vimeo (which I still don't think is a bad alternative). Anyway, a workaround that might be feasible for us is to actually publish the video within Captivate, and then upload the Captivate project onto the eCollege page as web content. It's quite a bit of a workaround, but it may be worth it if your SME really could benefit from video in his/her course. I am going to insert a blog post from another blog, which does a good job of laying out how to use flv + Captivate in order to get videos up in eCollege. Ignore the part about getting a service from which to stream the videos. When you get to the step where you choose a source from which to upload the video, we will upload it locally and not from a a web server, unless you are interested in FTP-ing into the eCollege servers and streaming it from th...