Sampling an Allyn and Bacon Companion CD-ROM
Compiled by Andy Jones
SITT, 2000
Many SITT presenters have used video, audio, animation and interactive quizzes and tests to augment their classes and lectures. Recognizing this need, some academic publishers have begun shipping interactive CD-ROMS with certain textbooks. Here you'll take a brief look at the promises made by Allyn and Bacon's writing guide: The New Century Handbook.
1) Go to the Cornell University Bookstore list of academic publishers at http://www.cbs.cornell.edu/camstore/store_services.html
2) Choose the first listed publisher's (Allyn and Bacon) "Main Link" at http://vig.abacon.com/
3) Scroll down to "Technology Solutions," the home page for all of Allyn and Bacon's web-available, interactive, and distributed learning topics at http://www.abacon.com/techsolutions/
4) Choose the second button at the top of your screen, "Interactive Editions." It should bring you to http://www.abacon.com/interactive/index.html.
5) Soon you'll see the covers of 18 textbooks, each of which comes with an interactive CD-ROM. Scroll a couple screens down until you see orange New Century Handbook in the middle of the page. Choose it and find yourself at http://www.abacon.com/interactive/hult/index.html.
6) At the bottom of this page you'll find the same four icons used in the Hult and Huckin book to link to "Weblinks," "Activity," "Video," and "Audio." The "Weblink" and "Activity" links are ready for you to try out. The video and audio clips can be downloaded and played, if you have the patience, the application, and the bandwidth, with RealPlayer.
7) If you wish, visit the "Weblink." It connects you to the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant," or http://powa.org/ where you and your students can discover helpful advice about some purposes and processes of composing and revising essays. For other university-sponsored Online Writing Labs, or "OWLs," see http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owls/writing-labs.html or http://departments.colgate.edu/diw/NWCAOWLS.html.
8) If you visit the "Activity" page, click on one encircled "E's" to take a quiz on subject/verb agreement, and then have a computer program evaluate and score the results. This quiz can be found at http://www.abacon.com/interactive/hult/exp554a/exp554a.htm. Note how this function replicates some of the teaching tools offered by Middleware programs like WebCT (at http://www.WebCT.com/).
9) To see what students and instructors are saying about Allyn and Bacon's "interactive editions" of textbooks, visit http://www.abacon.com/interactive/reviews.html.
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