Scrivener 2.0 as a course building tool

Scrivener 2.0 was recently released. It's a writing tool for the Mac with a Windows version coming next year. I've used Scrivener to organize online courses as well as to develop instructional manuals and I like the way it works. Since it accepts many file formats, you can easily drag in PDFs and other files to keep all of your course materials/writing resources together. To get everything out of Scrivener and into Moodle, for example, you can export each document in your Scrivener project as a separate file in PDF, RTF, or html format, among others. So everything could go into one folder and you could zip that folder and upload it to Moodle and go from there. If you like to break your projects into smaller pieces and integrate your online research, planning and writing, Scrivener is a nice tool.

Mike Wazowski made a short video last year showing how he uses Scrivener for course design.

There was also a fairly extensive review of Scrivener 1.x on chronicle.com earlier this year by Ryan Cordell.

In conjunction with the release of Scrivener 2.0, Don McAllister at Screencasts online put together a video introduction to what you can do with Scrivener, shown below.

Comments

Anonymous said…

I own Scrivener and this was a nice condensed tutorial to get me back in the groove of writing while staying organised. Thanks.

10:40 AM, December 26, 2011

Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Avoiding lost work in Moodle

When students are working in our installation of Moodle, there are some common ways that their work can be lost. Because Moodle doesn't save what you've written until you click Save (assignments) or Post to Forum in Forums, anything that interrupts your connection to Moodle can lead to lost work and frustration. Interruptions include computer problems or network outages or disconnections. If you are writing anything longer than a paragraph, it's a good idea to use a text editor to do your writing and then copy and paste into Moodle so no matter what happens, you won't lose any of your work. If you combine your use of a text editor with an online backup plan, you'll have a secure backup of all of your work even after the class ends and you can no longer access it (see below). You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but you may need to save your work as plain text first to avoid seeing formatting errors when you copy and paste from Word into Moodle. A

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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