Web Whiz Bang:

The Pros and Cons of
Adding FLASH to your site

Outline:

The first half hour is devoted to a brief presentation of technologies such as Animations, Plug-Ins, Interactions, and Audio, with an emphasis on associated issues of implementation and application.

Small work-groups of participants will spend thirty minutes at each of four work stations over the middle two hours of the workshop, spending time on:

Animated GIF editor and simple exercise

JavaScript editor and simple exercise

RealAudio Encoder and Server

Browser to look at examples of plug-ins (QuickTime Virtual Reality, Shockwave)

The goal of these brief sessions is to give each participant a taste of the opportunities and development issues presented by each kind of technology.

The last half hour will be a summary and discussion of the kinds of issues to think about when deciding to use these technologies.

1:30 - 2:00 talk/demo
2:00 - 2:30 hands-on session 1
2:30 - 3:00 hands-on session 2
3:00 - 3:30 break
3:30 - 4:00 hands-on session 3
4:00 - 4:30 hands-on session 4
4:30 - 5:00 summary, group discussion

On with the show

Language instruction is a notoriously resource-intensive activity. The world wide web is one possible technology to use for learning and teaching, or just administering, material. The HTML used by web pages essentially describes a page, but the page doesn't do much - it's static. In this session we will go through some demonstrations and small exercises with some of the technologies that add features that ordinary pages don't include.