By adding graphics, sound, and video, you can enrich the contents of your Digital Teacher web-based courses and tests. These multimedia elements can also enhance the look and feel of your web page.
Digital Teacher Web Application supports the following files types.
If you need to add other file types such as the Quicktime movie files and the Macromedia animation files, you should insert them manually. Please read the Inserting HTML tags on Web-based lesson topic in the Digital Teacher authoring program's help document.
All of these files can be displayed or played internally without external helper applications running.
Examples - without external helper
Examples - with external helper
Note: While images can be displayed inline within the Digital Teacher lesson page, audio and video are always played on a separate popup window. This is an intentional design to maintain the maximum cross-browser compatibility between Internet Explorer and Netscape. With this design, you can also add more than one multimedia to a single page of your web lesson.
Multimedia is inserted on the reading or question text using a Javascript function statement named playMedia().
(Example)
The rain in <A HREF="javascript:playMedia('v', 'spain.gif', 200, 200,
'my image')">Spain</A> mainly stays on the plain.
When the lesson is loaded on the browser, the function
creates a popup window and fetches the specified multimedia on the window by calling
the related plug-in using the <EMBED> HTML element.
This function is included in the dtMedia.js file. It is called from your web-based
lesson file when the lesson is loaded onto the browser. If you wish, you can modify
the code lines in the function. The dtMedia.js file is included in the
Digital Teacher Web Application comonents.
playMedia(fileType, sourceFile, w, h, alt)
){kind=link}
fileType - i for image, a for audio, v for video, f for file(html)
sourceFile - Location of the source multimedia file
w - Width of image or video
h - Height of image or video
alt - alternate text for image
When the width and height are specified, the size of the popup window becomes 110% of the size of the image or video. When unspecified, the popup window size is set to 50% of the user's screen size.
The problem with multimedia is that the source files are generally large. Unless your student is connected with high speed Internet access, it can take minutes before the student can see or hear anything on the browser. So, whenever possible, you will want to reduce the multimedia elements from your Digital Teacher web-based lessons. Please read Chapter 16: Optimizing Digital Teacher Web Lesson Page for additional information.
On the other hand, different browsers (in brand and version) are not compatible enough each other to display or play a particular type of multimedia. For example, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer may not play an internal multimedia using the ordinary <EMBED> tag while Netscape’s Navigator does. If necessary, you might consider adding external multimedia that can be accessed by all browsers using external helper applications.
While Digital Teacher enables you to include inline, or popup reading text in your lesson, you are limited to present only one reading per a chapter. However, you may want to provide the student with additional information. You can do this by inserting links (to external HTML files) on any place within inside your lesson text.
There are two ways you can insert these links on the lesson page.
If you want the external page presented to the student
<A HREF="javascript:playMedia('f','an_external_file.htm',0,0,'')">Open this page</A>
into the place where you want your student to click the link to open the file.
Note: Instead of using the above function, you might just want to add a plain HTML link with the TARGET attribute to open the document in a new window.
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