When you know you are being a bit too caught up in the details...

...but you just can't stop.

I have been building a study guide in storyline and I decided that I wanted information to appear when the mouse hovered over a button. This should have been quite simple but the nice people at articulate do like to have a little fun with you first it seems. To make something appear on mouseover you have to 1st make it disappear. Seems obvious doesn't it? And it is until you realise that there are 2 ways of making objects disappear.

The eye.... and the state

 

If you hide it using the eye it will be hidden until eternity and beyond if you are trying to make it appear when 'mouse hovered over' so you need to go to the 'States' tab and then make the initial state hidden. Then when you add the appropriate triggers *poof as if by magic your extra information will appear. Which is quite pleasing really. 

The other complication, somewhat more visual than practical is that your hidden objects are still visible on your work-in-progress slide. Consequently if you have several of these hidden items it looks a bit like this. 

 

 The reason I am telling you all this though is because when it is finished, after a whole afternoon of messing about it looked like this

 

And I am really quite happy with it .

THE END

 

pastry assistance

In response to  my previous post I decided to try and put a bit of motivation into a STATA quiz - seven sections of medical statistics (thrilling). So at the end of each section I added in an extra results slide to break up the quiz and say well done to the students. Time will tell if they like it!

It wasn't all plain sailing either... I was struggling to get it to report to the grade book so I decided to motivate myself by going out for a pastry. As soon as I got out of the office I realised what my problem was, because I had put in extra results slides, when publishing I needed to tell Blackboard which one to look at... simple really.

Needless to say even though the problem was solved I still went to get to the pastry, which, I think, proves that everything is better when you have a pain au chocolat.

Learning that really does hurt!

I was in the gym today and I had a boxing lesson with an awesome personal trainer followed by a 30 minutes abs session in which I am fairly certain she tried to kill me. This is excruciating learning in its purist form... I was learning... and it hurt. However, it got me thinking about why it was a good session and what I could take from it and put into my own 'teaching'. I use teaching in inverted commas because I don't teach, I build things which teach without me.
 For example, my current project is to build an interactive tool to help medical students identify different types of study design. Hopefully they will learn something but I am not actively teaching them anything (which in this case is a very good thing because I know nothing about medical study design).

I have never boxed before and I am not sure I was even terribly good at it but that is not the point a good teacher will tell you how to do something in a way that is easy to understand a great teacher will make you want to keep doing it and I think this is the key. Throughout the whole session I was being encouraged and pushed to be better and I think this is the key to great teaching but how do you take that into an on-line environment? (I really don't know but I am going to keep thinking about it) How do you maintain student motivation through something like 50 questions on medical statistics? How do you make someone keep doing stomach crunches when everything about it hurts?

The final question I can answer because someone makes me do it every week - constant encouragement, manageable chunks and a bit of good fun. The 1st two questions I am not so sure about but I am going to make an effort to try and fit them in to my 'teaching' and hope that it will help the students keep going until they get to question 50 on medical statistics!

A mouse ran over my buttons

I have recently started working on a new website for myself, inspired in part by making one for a good friend of mine. Furthermore after going to a workshop recently and seeing someone make 'onmouseover' buttons I decided I wanted some. So I set about making some...

The website for my friend and her awesome business for one reason or another is being made through wix.com so I though I would start there. They have nice templates and can produce a very aesthetically pleasing site quite easily, however there is no obvious way of playing with the html so... no onmouseover buttons here.

So I decided to go back to google sites which I have used before to see what I could do there.  With the help of some html tutorial sites I made a nice piece of code which made a lovely button which grows when the mouse goes over it..

...which of course doesn't work in my blog as it doesn't in a google site.

So then what?
A bit of research led me to go hunting for a gadget to make this happen and after a bit of playing I found this one http://hosting.gmodules.com which very simply allows you to make nice buttons which pop out when your cursor passes over them. Job done!
Thanks to Paul Kern for the gadget.

To add his gadget to your site go to 'insert more gadgets' and search 'public' for image mouseover and you will see several. There are a couple of nice ones which change one picture to another but they require both pictures to be the same size which didn't fit my profile but they still worked well. Of course you also need to have the images uploaded to your site 1st.