Welcome to the Workshop

Creating a good looking and functional course web site is much easier than it used to be. Google Page Creator is free, provides 100MB of storage, and doesn't require any special software - just your web browser.

I decided to include the posts from the first training session in Yakima since they have some useful resources and interesting content. Several of the posts were inspired by comments left by participants. I love getting comments!

Notice the links on the right side of the screen? In addition to the handout we'll be using today, there's a link to a 3 question evaluation survey for the session. I'm asking that you complete it as soon as the session is over. This anonymous feedback will help me improve future workshops.

I've also included some resources that I think you'll find quite useful.

Goodbye, Textbooks; Hello, Open Source Learning

Here is another great resource suggested by Sally Dixon. This is a must watch as she pointed out in the comment she left on the blog today. Thanks, Sally!

SlideShare - PowerPoint on Steroids

| View | Upload your own

Thanks to Sally Dixon, I (we) have a new Web 2.0 tool to explore. This one is for posting and sharing PowerPoint slides.

1. SlideShare
2. About SlideShare

Accessibility of Googlepages Web Sites

I did some checking after the question this morning about accessibility and the Google Page Creator tool. I found a free "accessibility checker" called WAVE and I tested some pages. The biggest problem was images that are inserted into the page that don't have alternate text for screen readers. I encourage you to bookmark this web site and test your own pages out in them.

More information on accessibility is available from WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind).

What does a screen reader sound like? Listen to this.

Welcome to the Developing a Course Web Site Training

Up until recently developing a course web site meant learning new software to create web pages and then another program to copy the pages to a web server. With the easy to use and free tools available now, creating a web site can be done quickly without much of a learning curve.

In this half day session, we'll use Google Page Creator to put together a quick course web site. All the development work is done with a web browser and your course web site is published on a Google web server with the click of a button.

Another free tool we'll use during this session is PrimoPDF Maker. I strongly recommend that you distribute your handouts, syllabus, and assignments in the PDF file format. It is much more accessible than Word especially now that some of us are using Word 2007 and others are using Word 2003.