When designing, creating and saving your exercises, it is a good idea to organise your files in such a way that it will be easy to upload them and to remember how your site is structured. The LGU authoring system provides a facility to create a Home Page linking a number of exercises that you want to group together in a teaching and learning unit.
Once you have decided on a structure for your web-based language learning materials, store each unit into one folder. The name of the folder should help you to remember the content of the unit. You may want to define a unit according to one or more criteria such as:
materials to be studied during each week of the semester (week 1, week 2, etc.)
materials relating to one specific topic (looking for a job, electromagnetic force, banking, cinema, molecules, etc.)
materials relating to specific language skills or learning strategies (vocabulary acquisition, grammatical structures, translation, aural comprehension, concept mapping, etc.)
etc.
Each unit will be saved within one folder containing a file named home.htm. You may want to create a parent page which will allow you to link all the different home pages created with the LGU authoring system.
Your site may then be represented as follows:
Once you are satisfied that your exercises can be published on the web, you need to upload them to your web account. For this, you can use a FTP client (File Transfer Protocole), e.g. a Windows based programme that allow you to copy your site from your hard disk to the server over the DCU network (and vice-versa).
Let's assume that you have just created a set of exercises to be used by students in preparation of Week 4, Module 3. You have also created a Home page with the LGU authoring system. The sub-folders and files corresponding to these exercises are all contained in a folder called week4. The full path is perhaps:
C:\\My Documents\Mywebsite\teaching\module3\week4
and your Windows Explorer screen may look like this:
To launch the FTP client from your computer in DCU, go to START, PROGRAMME FILES, CISCO SUITE 100, FTP Client. You will need to connect to the DCU staff web server. To connect, you need to know the hostname ( the name of the server, e.g. staff.dcu.ie), your username and password.
Once you are connected, the right pane will show you the folders within your public_html folder (you may need to double click on the folder icon or name). To be accessible via the web, your folders and files must be located in the public_html folder.
On the DCU staff web server, you have perhaps the following folders or files:
...\public_html\index.htm
...\public_html\research
...\public_html\teaching
...\public_html\teaching\teaching.htm
...\public_html\teaching\module3.htm
...\public_html\teaching\module3\week1
...\public_html\teaching\module3\week2
...\public_html\teaching\module3\week3
...\public_html\teaching\module3\week3\home.htm
You now want to copy week4 from your computer to the server. For this you highlight the folder ...\public_html\teaching\module3\week3 in the right pane then click on the folder week4 on your computer (as in C:\\My Documents\Mywebsite\teaching\module3\week4 ), then click on the COPY button.
That's all! Once the files have been copied, you can disconnect...
In order to access the exercises corresponding to Module3 - Week 4, students will type the following URL in their browser:
http://webpages.dcu.ie/~yourname/teaching/module3/week4/home.htm
In general however, they will be able to follow the links from your welcome page (index.htm) and bookmark the desired page...