How can you get the digital content that you have created into the hands of your students?

Since each item you have created so far in this workshop has been saved as a standard computer file, it can be delivered to your students just as any file would be delivered: as an attachment to email; on a CD or DVD; on a USB flash memory card; or thrugh a web site. It matters not whether it's video, text, audio, images, web page, podcast, or some combination thereof -- all of your content creations can be passed through thenetwork using normal channels, downloaded to the students computer or iPod or iPad, and displayed.

Most faculty in higher education choose one or more of the following methds to distribute digital learning materials to their students:

Web Site

If you have your own web site, or space for one provided by the college or university, this can be an easy way for your students to get hold of what you hae created. You can incorporate your materials in an iWeb site, then publish the site as a folder on your own computer, and finally copy that folder to your web space. Your school's system administrator can show you how to copy the site.

When your students go to your site, they'll be able to see (or hear or read) your creations, and also to download them to their computers or iPods.

(If your school does not provide we space, you can creae your own by setting up a MobileMe account with Apple. It costs $100 per year, and is probably the easiest and most direct way to set up your own web site, and to post materials to it. iWeb, iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand can post directly to your .Mac site.)

Content Management System

If your school has a system such as Blackboard, Sakai, or Moodle that provides a web ste for each course, this may be the best and easiest way to distribute your content. Log in to your CMS, go to the course in question, and add a document for each digital creation. The administrator of your school's CMS can help you learn to do this.

When your students connect to the CMS, it automatically lists the courses they are enrolled in, and when they connect to the course, they see the liast of materials you have posted there. And can read them on the screen, or download them for later consultation.

iTunes U

Many institutions of higher education have joined with Apple to make it very easy for your students to subscribe to your dgital course materials, in the same way they subscribe to music and movies. They use the iTunes application on their computer (it works from both Mac and Windows) to connect to your school's instance of iTunes U. When they log in, the see the courses they are enrolled in, and a list of materials.

They download these to their computer and to their iPod just as they are used to with their entertianment content. Your school's information technology or academic computng department will know if you have iTunes U on your campus.

iWeb makes it easy to embed your academic content into a nice-looking web page. To learn about iWeb, you can consult the online tutorial, or follow the simple instructions below.

iWeb lets you choose a pre-designed template for your web site. iWeb provides a wide range of preofesionally-designed templates, each designed for a particular style of web page, to contain certain types of media. For instance, some templates include mostly text, with a few pictures; others are designed specifically to display a video or a set of photographs. To build your own site, you select a template, and then replace its content with your own.

Follow these steps to build a simple web site with iWeb:

1. Launch iWeb.
2. If you (or someone else on this computer) has already created a web site with iWeb, then choose from the menubar File --> New Site.
3. Browse the templates to find the one that best matches the content you have to display. You will see a variety of design themes, and within each theme, several types of web pages.
4. Choose the theme and the page style that best matches the content you want to distribute. For instance, if you have creted a video, choose a movie page. If you want to distribute a series of images, choose a photos page, and so forth.
5. You will see the template appear full-size, with irrelevant text, images, and other content. You task is to replace this content with your own.
6. To replace text, first select the non-sensical lorem ipsum text in the templte. But do not delete it. Type or paste your own text to replace what's there.
7. To replace an image, first select the template image. But do not delete it.
   
8. From the menubar, choose View -- > Show media browser.
9. In the Media Browser window, click the Photos tab. You will see all of the images in your iPhoto library.
10. Drag an image from the Media Browser into the iWeb window, and drop it on the picture you want to replace.
11. Use a similar procedure to move videos from the Media Browser to the iWeb page.
12. Replace all of the template content with your own. If you have nothing to replace it with, simply delete the template content.

Your site may contain several pages. To add a page to your site, choose from the menubar File --> New Page. Then repeat steps 4 to 11 above. Do the same for any additional pages you may need. Additional pages will be linked automatically from the first page you created.

When your site is complete, you may publish it.

• If you have a MobileMe account, choose from the menubar File --> Publish to MobileMe. This will post the site to the MobileMe web server, under your name. To connect to your site on MobileMe, open your web browser and visit http://web.me.com/youraccountname.
  
  
• If you don't, choose from the menubar File --> Publish to a folder. This will publish the site to a folder on your computer. To connect to your site on a folder on your own computer, go to the folder you just pubished and double-click the index.html file.

For others to see this web site, you'll need to copy it to a web server. Your campus academic computing staff can show you how to do this, or do it for you.