Discussion Ideas

Submitted by jfalkofske on Wed, 05/27/2009 - 04:48
in
Online discussions are often just too text-based. As one means of encouraging some creativity, I have posted a few images inside the descriptions of my discussion threads.
At the least, I hope that this will make topics easier to locate for my grading purposes (and for students wanting to post comments) - especially when I re-shuffle the order of the discussion topics throughout the term.

Discussion area showing pciture icons for each forum

Moreso, I hope to encourage students to make use of images, sounds, and possibly even video links in their major projects and shared research resources.

Here is a screenshot of the entrance to my discussion area.

In D2L, you can add images into your discussion topics by using the HTML Editing Tool for composing the forum descriptions and then using the image tool to UPLOAD A NEW IMAGE (that will appear in the page).

WARNING!!! If you are using D2L, make sure that the files saved into D2L have no space characters or other punctuation symbols in their file names. Use of the ampersand (&) gets especially rough. "Just say no!"

Similar use of images can also be placed into descriptions for the Dropboxes, Grade Items, and Quiz descriptions and questions.

Please make sure that any image you are using is well captioned and/or contains appropriate ALT text in the IMG tag.