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People have complained about the complicated loading of activities and versions in PA, so how about this as a workflow:

1. The first time a student logs on, they are asked to choose the activity from the list, as it does now. They are ordered last to first.

2. Each subsequent time they log in, that same activity is automatically loaded (although they can load a different activity if they wish by click on the “Load Activity” button).

3. Each time a student logs in, the most recently saved version is loaded, be that a deliberate save by pressing the “Save” button, or an automatic undo save that occurs every 4 minutes.

I don’t see any downsides to this and it will hopefully streamline the process so kids don’t lose their work, but I may have missed some scenario or other.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts on this ASAP.

Thanks,

Bill

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I’m allowing the browser to cache images and sound files when playing back movies using the show.php method. This should make it faster to play movies once they have been loaded.
Let me know if there are any problems.

-Bill

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Would it be possible to have a confirmation dialog box appear before executing the “remove new pix” option on the Find tab? This was requested by a teacher working with the Teaching with Primary Sources summer school program in Fairfax.

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Now that movie-makers are able to set “default” pans/zooms for images they add to My Folder, it would be nice if the thumbnail for the image reflected the Start of that pan/zoom. Currently, it appears that the thumbnail image is determined by a set upper-left point ignoring any negative space in the image.

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Any movies from now (2pm EST 5/12/08) are instrumented and will produce activity logs. The teacher’s class list has a new button aside the “View” button called “Log” which will show this log, or you can see it by going to www.primaryaccess.org/log.php

-Bill

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The teacher side will now let you add audio clips to activities, where they will show up in student’s Find panel lists. If they bring up the details of an audio clip, the button’s name will say “Add as music” instead of “Add to Folder” and clicking on it will load that clip as the music clip.

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I’ve put up a prototype for showing the student activity logs. Right now I have just put some sample data in, as it will take time to instrument all of PA’s events, but I wanted to get a start on the viewer, that a teacher could use to get some insights on how the student moved through PA, and help with heir assessment.

I’ve put up a few stats that can be gleaned from the log, but any suggestiions for useful displays (thanks to Google charts API) , summary, descriptive, or calculated from the logs. The raw data can be cut and pasted to Excel or SPSS for more sophisticated analysis.

http://www.primaryaccess.org/log.php

The only user name that has any data is “guest” for now.

I think if we can come up with information useful to teachers, this will be a valuable aid in assessing PA movies. We can then try our some automated assessments of the raw data using Bayesian statistics once there is a big-enough training pool.

-Bill

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This problem keeps cropping up with users:

After creating a class and activity, students are not associated with an activity.

Recently one teacher mistakenly placed the activity name under Class Description. Therefore, she thought that she had defaulted the whole class to that particular activity.

This made me think: shouldn’t all members of a newly-created Class auto-inherit a default activity number? Would it be possible to add a Class option like “default class activity=” and then have that selection default to the most recently created activity made by that teacher? This way, all students in a class become associated with an activity even if the teacher does not happen to designate which activity that is…

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As we discussed in the meeting last week, I’ve implemented the changes to PrimaryAccess in an attempt to streamline the recording process:

1. When you play the movie, the status of what audio tracks are active will be displayed, ie.
“Has no sound”, “Has narration”, “Has narration & music”, etc.

2. The “Send” button in the Narrate panel has been renamed “Save.”

3. Clicking on that “Save” button will automatically save the script to the server, under the currently active version.

4. Automatically setting of Autotime cannot be accomplished, due to server timing issues.

Please look through these on the app and see if they help, and let me know if any other ways to make this complicated process easier for students.

-Bill

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