Category: Guide

Technology in your pocket

We have had a few enquiries via FMS Enquiries about getting tasks done without specialist equipment we would normally have on hand in our offices.

We have recently added some information to the FMS Community on how to use mobile devices to produce learning materials. A kind of Do It Yourself guide for producing materials from home or on location.

Create video, audio, images, presentations, conduct meetings, and communicate with students and staff. Set students tasks to do on their own devices. Check it out here: https://ncl.instructure.com/courses/30988/pages/technology-in-your-pocket.

Your device may not have all the features identified, but it may give you some ideas.

Branching Activities

Following a request to create branching activities for the BMS Health and Safety Course, we have added an example of a branching activity to the FMS Community so that others can try these out. These activities can be used to present a scenario with a range of options for students to follow, like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

A branching activity was included in the Health and Safety course this year to guide students through a scenario where a fellow student becomes unwell. At each stage, some information and a set of choices is presented. The student clicks through to discover the consequences of their choices, and finally, an outcome is presented. Students can run through the activity multiple times to try out different paths through the scenario.

These activities are built by setting up pages in Canvas to represent each stage and adding buttons that link pages together in the right order depending on the choices.

You can try out an example branching activity in the FMS Community. This example has 13 different pages, including a landing page where students start the activity. The number of pages you need to create will depend on how complex you want your scenario to be.

If you’d like to try making your own branching activity, you can find instructions here: https://ncl.instructure.com/courses/30988/pages/creating-branching-activities.

Accessibility and Ally

This week I have been working on how to improve accessibility of resources, focusing particularly on the four commonest issues flagged by Ally in Canvas. I have been working on the BMS Health and Safety course to check its accessibility. I found that while it’s easy to add an image description in the Ally view within Canvas, I wasn’t familiar with how to correct issues within the PDF itself. After a few searches online, I was able to come up with a guide to help others fix these issues. A quick summary is below. You can access the full walkthrough on the FMS Community.

The four commonest issues I found were; a lack of image descriptions, a lack of headings, the lack of document title, PDFs not being tagged.

Find the Original Document

These can be added under image formatting tools in Word and PowerPoint.

Add or Define Headings

Make sure you are using the built-in style galleries and slide templates to format your document. This makes it easier for screen-readers to understand the structure of the information.

Add a Document Title

This setting lives on the ‘Info’ tab of a file – one that I had never paid attention to before!

Tag your PDF

After you have saved your file, you can also export it to PDF from the option on the same menu. Go to the advanced settings area and you can make sure that your PDF maker will include bookmarks and headings.

You can access the full walkthrough for each of these steps on the FMS Community. More information about Ally and accessibility is available via LTDS.

Creating Buttons in Canvas

We have recently added a page to the FMS Community showing how you can add buttons to your pages. To add a button to your page, you just need to add a little snippet of HTML in the required place, and alter the specifications to suit what you’d like.

You can view the full instructions on the FMS Community page.

The button code is simple to edit following the instructions above, and buttons can be used for a range of purposes, such as navigating forward and back through a course, or links to external resources.

They come in a range of predefined colours, and are automatically formatted to look in keeping with the rest of your content.

Buttons can make your content more visually appealing, and can improve ease navigation through content. If you have a link that you want to stand out, try adding a button to your page!