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iLabs Instructions for EOTU Faculty Getting Started
Point your browser to http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/home/
In the box at the right, you will be prompted for your login and password. You can use the login and password (I hope you can remember it!) you used for the EOTU Faculty site this summer: enter your email account and associated password.
Once you’ve entered this info, you’ll see a list of iLabs to which you belong on the right (this list should include, at a minimum, the EOTU Summer Faculty site and two new sites (EOTU Test and EOTU_Training) that I’ve created as models. Click the green “Create” button:
In the following screen, click on the button signifying you agree to the policy terms. Fill in the information in the following screen: remember to put something in the nickname field: use only lowercase letters (no numbers) in this field—“anthroeotu” will work but “Anthro500” will not work.
When you’ve completed this form, you’ll be taken to your new iLabs site:
Creating your iLabs Site
FIRST STEP: MODIFY PERMISSIONS
In The “Enter email addresses” box, type in your student email accounts. By default, you are entered as the lab administrator. Once you’ve entered student accounts, click on the “update user roles” button. You’ll be returned to the site front.
SECOND STEP: ADDING BRICKS A. (DOCUMENT CENTER) “Bricks” are the modules that enable you to add content to the course. I suggest you start by adding a document center—a place where you and your students can upload files. To create one, start by clicking on the “Add New Brick” link on the right of your home screen:
The next screen asks you what kind of brick you want to add. Choose “Document Center” from the pull-down menu, and click on the create button:
The resulting “set-up wizard” has 4 steps.
First, the wizard asks what you want to call the document center; you can let the default name stand, and hit the continue button:
The next screen tells you that you don’t have to worry about setting permissions for the brick, since they’ve already been determined, so again you click on the “continue” button:
Then you’re asked what you want to call the root directory. Unless you don’t like the default name of “Home,” you can again hit the continue button:
The final screen asks whether you want to arrange the brick’s position or return to your home page. Choose the link that returns you to the iLab home page.
You will return to the home page, where you can add more bricks.
B. (BULLETIN BOARD)
This is by no means required, but if you’d like to see your students discuss a topic or reading online (not as “live” chat, but as considered, asynchronous responses), you can add a bulletin board link (as I have done in the EOTU_Test site). From the home page, open the “Add New Brick” link; choose Bulletin Board from the drop-down list. The wizard here is brief; it will ask you want you want to call the bulletin board (when you’ve accepted the name or created a different name, click the continue button at the bottom), then tell you on the next screen that permissions have already been set, and on the following screen tell you that the bulletin board has been created. Choose the “return to iLab home page” link. You now have a bulletin board! (You can delete this, or any other brick, at any time.)
C. (INQUIRY UNIT) Perhaps it’s time, now, to get to the heart of the course materials, which are conveyed through the Inquiry Unit bricks.
As with the creation of all bricks, start by clicking on the “Add New Brick” link to your right on the home page. From the drop-down menu, choose, “Inquiry Unit Builder” (the bottom line in the menu). In the next screen, provide a name and description for the unit:
Click “Continue” on the next screen. The following screen is important whenever you create an inquiry unit. Be sure to choose the EOTU template, as in the screen below, and then click on the continue button:
As you can see, there’s an option for selecting a different template. This option, not yet available, is in development as of 8/30/2005.
Use the last screen of the set-up wizard to return to your iLabs home page. This is what you should see:
The key point, here: Creating an Inquiry brick is a two-part process. First, you create an inquiry unit brick, and then you create a unit within the brick. You start this second step by clicking on the “Create Unit” link within your Inquiry Unit brick.
When you create the unit (see next page for screen shot, with numbers keyed to the list below), you will need to make several choices.
Title: Obviously, you will want the title to describe or forecast the contents of the unit.
1.
Enter the accounts of all members who have the privilege of
authoring (writing or editing) the contents of the unit. 2.
“This unit is private only to the authors” [awkwardly named]:
Choose this option only if you want only the authors of the unit to
see its contents. When students create an inquiry unit (as they
will be doing), they may want their inquiry units to be
private—either because they’re working with sensitive material and
information, or because they’re shy (at first) to expose their work
to others. As administrator, you can always see their work, whether
or not they name you as author, but I suggest you ask students to
include you as author of units they create. 3.
“Receive email when comments are made to this unit”: this
option is desirable if you (or your student authors) want to know
when they’ve received feedback. When you’re first developing and
testing a site, you may not want to choose this option (you’ll
receive email every time you enter a test comment). This option can
be changed at any time. 4.
Keywords: As students create their units based on research,
encourage them to provide keywords, which will facilitate searching
for others. Providing keywords is perhaps less important for
inquiry units you create, unless you want to model appropriate
behavior for your students. 5.
“Scope and Location”: Check all boxes that are appropriate
here. 6. “Course” Check the appropriate box for your course.
Once you’ve entered the info for the above screen, you’ll see (at last) the EOTU template:
Note that you can edit the unit (at any time) by clicking on the “Edit Unit” link in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
You create information under each of the headings by clicking on the “add new entry here” button under the relevant heading. (You can also copy from an existing file and paste into the text box). For example, when I clicked on the button under the “About the Ethnographer” section, I encountered this screen:
After I typed in some text and clicked on the “Post entry” button, this is what the section looked like:
As you can see, creation of an entry enables four tabs across the top of the section: viewers can comment and view the history of entries: authors can edit their entries and add files to them, or delete one or more entries. [Note as of 8/30/2005: comment and entry deletion functions are still “buggy”—the program developer is aware of the problems and will fix them shortly.]
Those who view an entry and comment on it can make their comments visible to three different groups: everyone (green dot), only other members of their iLab (yellow dot), or only the authors (red dot). Samples appear above.
Importantly, you can add files to any entry. In the sample below, I first clicked on the browse button, and then opened the file I wanted to upload from my hard drive, entered some text on the box, and then clicked on the “Post entry” button:
Here’s what the “Question” section now looks like:
Note: When you first upload to a section of the EOTU template, you can upload only one file the first time, but by clicking on the “Edit Entry/Add Files tab at the top, you can upload as many additional files to the section as you like (one at a time). In the box below, I’ve edited my original entry, and added files, by using the “Edit Entry/Add Files” tab.
Let’s leave this inquiry unit brick. Perhaps now is a good time for a navigation tip: To see where you are, and to move around within iLabs, remember to look at the locating link at the top of your screen:
You can always move back home by clicking on the link naming your iLabs site.
D. (LIST TOOL)
I’m not sure I know how to use, much less teach, some of this tool’s functions—but I can demonstrate how to add a contact list, which can be very helpful for you and your students.
Start from the home page by opening the “Add New Brick” link on the right and choosing list tool from the drop-down menu that follows. In the next screen, name the tool, provide a brief description of the list’s function, and click “continue,” as in the screen below:
Click “continue” on the following permissions screen. The next screen asks you to choose a template: Choose “Contact List” and click the continue button:
Don’t worry about the next screen, which offers advanced sorting options: just click continue. You can also ignore (or alter) the following screen, which looks like this:
The default number of contacts to display is 5 (in the box by the red question mark). If you abide by this default, the list will accept as many entries as you care to make, but display only the top five in a default view (members of the class can expand the list to see everyone). You can change the default to display as many contacts as you enter, but this means that the list tool will swallow up a great deal of space. Once you’ve decided this display option, you’ll see the following screen, which indicates the list tool has been added. To actually create the list of contacts, click the “add new item” link.
In the next screen, add information for one of the contacts; keep adding information for each contact until you’ve finished.
Adding a Contact to the List
Completed Contact List
E. (OTHER BRICKS) While the above four bricks are perhaps the ones you’ll use most (or exclusively), there are other tools offered by iLabs. The first of these is the Text Panel, which you can evoke by clicking on the “Add New Brick” on the right of your home page and choosing “Text Panel” from the drop-down menu. This tool offers WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) html formatting. You can paste text from a file directly into the text box and then format it (by font, color, location on the page, etc.); you can add images; you can add links. This tool is most helpful, I think, if you want the page students first see when they enter their iLabs to resemble a Web page. It is not a necessity. I can show you how to use this tool in individual sessions (and I’m happy to do it).
Three other brick options remain to be discussed:
Login Panel: This adds a brick to your screen showing the iLabs to which you belong. Some people find this useful (especially if they’re members of several iLabs), while others find it distracting and a space hog.
Recently Update d iLabs: This brick provides the same information you see at the bottom of the middle panel in the screen you use to login to iLabs. Like the login panel, this brick eats space.
Search and Browse: Enables searching of iLabs with public permissions. EOTU iLabs are private, so this function isn’t necessarily helpful.
Arranging Your Site’s Layout
Once you’ve added the bricks you need to get started, you can arrange them as you see fit. By default, iLabs adds user-created bricks to the left-hand column, and displays administrative tools in the right-hand column. You may well want to add some bricks to the center. To arrange the display of bricks, click on the “Arrange Bricks” link on the right of the home page:
This invokes the following screen:
Display Screen
As a demonstration, I want to display the class roster (the List Tool) in the center column. To do that, I first open the drop-down tool at the top left of the screen and choose “Class Roster and Contacts”; then, in the middle drop-down box, I choose “Column 2” (Column 1 is left, Column 2 is center, and Column 3 is right). Then I click on the “Add Brick to Display” button. Here’s the result of my efforts:
“Class Roster and Contacts” has been added as a “large” brick to the center section, but it has not been deleted from the left column (in other words, you can display the same brick in more than one place simultaneously). But I don’t want this simultaneous display; to remove the class roster display from the left-hand column, I click on the red x underneath it (this hides the brick from the column, but does not delete it).
Under each brick on this screen, you can see green triangles: if you click on the triangle pointing up, the brick itself goes up one level. The reverse is true, as you might guess: if you click a triangle pointing down: the brick’s display moves down one. After I moved the class roster to the center column (“Column 2”), I decided to make it the top brick in the center. I clicked on the upward-pointing triangle under “Class Roster and Contacts” with the following result:
I then clicked on the “Update Layout” button to confirm the changes I’d made. The front page now looks like this:
The Class Roster and Contacts Brick is now at the top of the center column.
Last Updated: August 29, 2005 |
