A Few Things to Consider Before you Submit an Activity
Activity pages are designed to:
- Provide all of the information an educator needs to successfully implement an activity
- Enable educators to determine, at a glance, if they want to learn more about this activity
Each activity is structured with 8 parts:
- Heading which contains the activity title, author attribution, email, a brief summary of activity, and a related image that provides context with visual appeal
- Measurable goals for student learning
- Context for use in different teaching situations
- Activity description and teaching materials needed to implement the activity
- Teaching notes and tips for instructor
- Assessment which describes how the instructor will measure students' achievement of learning goals
- Resources and references to other online information in support of the specific activity
- Short description which is displayed in search return results
Tips for Authors
Effective use of images:Images can be used in any section. Images provide visual appeal but should also serve a clear purpose. Often a simple image can convey at a glance what the activity will be about or give the instructor a sense of the data collected. Our evaluation studies indicate that a simple graphic to show potential data eases the instructor's effort of adopting the activity into teaching practice. Examples:
- use of image to show data in Teaching Materials section
- use of image to show type of content at a glance
- use of image as visual appeal
LinkingLinks can also be effectively used in any section to link to webpages within serc.carleton.edu, external web pages, catalog records, or uploaded files.
What should the link say? The verbiage of the actual link text should match the name of the page or file that is being linked. Avoid vague phrases such as "click here" or "this page" for the link name.
- Uploaded Files: When including a link to an uploaded file, the file type will automatically be shown to the user along with file size and the date the file was uploaded. For example: (Acrobat (PDF) 9kB Jun17 03) or (Microsoft Word 61kB Feb16 05).
- Catalogued Resources: Links to cataloged records, such as Physical Geology (more info) will automatically have a (more info) link displayed following the catalog record title.
How to handle long scrolling pages
Ideally, online information is easier to read in small chunks of text with short sentences and effective use of bulleted lists. In trying to keep an activity on one web page, there are a couple of ways to help the user.
Use the hidden text tag for supporting content. This tag and its counter part end hidden are used to surround text that we'd like to have hidden except when the user explicitly wants to see it. This is also how image captions are handled. For example: Example of hidden tag
Another way to handle long scrolling pages is to add 'anchor-like' links to the top of the page as a sort of alternate navigation technique. For example: Example of using anchors