CHAPTER 2
ACTIVITIES
An Activity is a special purpose tool which helps a user or group of users complete a task. Activities such as List and Vote can help groups reach a consensus. The Poll/Survey activity can assist in data collection. Many of the activities are useful in establishing a classroom environment. For example, the Gradebook activity is a tool which allows a member of a group (i.e., a professor), record, store, and calculate grades for the rest of the group (i.e., a class).
An activity is stored as an attachment to a conference comment. For example, there may be a conference for all the students in a biology class. The professor could submit a comment in the biology class conference stating that a Gradebook activity was attached. The students would use the Gradebook attachment to view their grades for the class.
Each of the EIES® activities is presented in detail in the following chapters. This manual describes both how to create an activity and how to use an activity that has already been created.
2.1 Accessing Activities
Activities are stored as attachments to conference comments. When you view a comment that contains an activity, the text of the item will normally include an explanation of the attached activity (this explanation is added by the author of the item, some authors may not include a description). Next, the activity is presented to you as with any other type of attachment (See Chapter 1). You will be asked if you want to use the attachment. If you choose Yes, the activity will be presented to you. Keep in mind that some activities can take a long time to complete. For example, a Poll/Survey activity may include twenty or thirty questions or more. If you wish to do the activity at a later time, simply answer No to the use attachment question.
The number of activities waiting for you to complete appears on the homebase screen. You can access your waiting activities from the homebase screen or from the conference where the activity was presented.
2.1.1 Accessing Activities from Homebase
To access your waiting activities from Homebase, select Activities from the homebase screen. You will be presented with the following screen:
All activities which are waiting for you to complete are listed on this screen. ‘Status’ refers to whether the activity is available for you to complete (some activities expire after a certain amount of time). ‘Your status’ indicates if you have completed the activity. On this screen, ‘Your status’ will always be listed as undone, since this screen only lists activities that are waiting for you to complete. Date indicates the day that the activity was completed. As with ‘Your status’, the date field will always be ‘-’ because only activities waiting to be completed are listed here.
Activities which you have completed do not appear on this screen. You can view any completed activity in the conference where the particular activity was presented to you.
While you can access and complete activities from the Homebase screen, we recommend that you access activities from within the conference where the activity was presented to you. Accessing activities from a conference is described in the following section.
2.1.2 Accessing Activities From a Conference
To access an activity from within a conference, first enter a conference that has an activity in it. To determine which of your conferences have activities you can view the activities review screen (select Activities at the HOMEBASE). If you do not have any waiting activities you could join a public conference (such as the Welcome conference or Practice) which may have activities available, you may want to check with the conference moderator to be sure.
Once you locate and enter a conference that contains an activity, select review activitY list (note that you need to type Y to access activities from within a conference, since A refers to Accepted here).
The choices on the Activities Review screen include:
Do: Select this to complete an activity.
Create: Allows you to set up a new activity. Refer to the EIES® Moderator’s Guide for information on creating activities.
monitor Your activity: Allows the creator of an activity to view certain statistics regarding that activity.
drop/Intake: Removes an activity from your list of waiting activities. Note that this is only applicable when you review activities from HOMEBASE.
All the activities which were submitted in this conference are listed on this screen (even any that you ‘dropped’ with the drop/Intake command) . ‘Status’ refers to whether the activity is available for you to complete (some activities expire after a certain amount of time). ‘Your status’ indicates if you have completed the activity or not (done or undone). Date indicates the day that the activity was completed. A ‘-’ is displayed after activities that have not been completed.
Some activities are ‘sequenced’ which means you must complete them in a specific order. If you have sequenced activities waiting to be completed { you will know they are sequenced because...I need a little help here...how does a user know that they have a sequenced activity?? }
If you wish to complete an activity select Do. Note the type of activity you wish to do, and refer to the appropriate chapter of this manual for further instructions.