Synchronous lecture materials. How?

February 23rd, 2008 by jose

The efficient academic google group has a thread on . Any hack addressing this has a high chance of saving several hours per week for those of you who teach.

Given lecture material has three components:

  1. Slides for digital projection (preferable PDFs rather than PowerPoint or Keynote)
  2. Lecture notes to support what I need to say and remember
  3. Lecture handout

I regularly update all three, but I am finding keeping all three in sync to be a bit tedious.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but what I am visualising is some sort of single document, where you  write the lecture handout. I could then update this with new information between presenting the lecture.

If you have a solution, drop by and post it there (or here!).

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7 Responses to “Synchronous lecture materials. How?”

  1. Chaim KrauseNo Gravatar Says:

    Docbook + XSLT + PDF Creator with some Python glue.

  2. Will RobertsonNo Gravatar Says:

    LaTeX is pretty ideal for this sort of thing. Take a look at the beamer package; it contains several methods to help with slides plus auxiliary content.

  3. jim lg Says:

    my school has started making slides on http://www.voicethread.com which allows for easy sychronization and collaboration on lectures

  4. George TziralisNo Gravatar Says:

    Maybe this is not what you are looking for exactly, but you may find it interesting:
    I’m trying to teach a data mining course by using a blog to post lecture notes and assignments, to live stream the lectures force students to post their assignments on a weekly basis.
    Here is the link: http://dataminingcourse.wordpress.com (well, apologies, it’s in greek :)
    and here you can find more info in english: http://dataminingntua.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/acoursebyblog/

    Blogging is not synchronous by its strict definition, by it’s kind-of direct and dynamic for sure, right?

    P.S: Just found your blog, pretty amazed that found something so straight to the point, keep up :)

  5. DanNo Gravatar Says:

    Another option may just be using an image uploading site whereby you can retrieve the images onto CD?

  6. club penguinNo Gravatar Says:

    I’m trying to teach a data mining course by using a blog to post lecture notes and assignments, to live stream the lectures force students to post their assignments on a weekly basis.

  7. Academic Productivity » Literate programming for talks: Beamer, Sweave and LaTeX Says:

    [...] site. Outlining your talks for example helps get away from the staccato style of PowerPoint and as commenters have pointed out here, there are lots of ways to mix slides and narrative in one source file. But I want to go step [...]

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