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Joe's Snap Theme Quick Tips & Tricks
Joe's Snap Theme Quick Tips & Tricks
(5 minute overview)
(5 minute overview)
Snap Theme Tips and Tricks.mp4
Snap is a brand new, forward thinking user interface that is the future of what many LMS systems will look like! With lots of white space and ability to build in visual cues, Snap emulates iOS and Android's interface avoiding text-dense screens and cognitive overload!
The Snap team had funding from Blackboard / Moodlerooms to do user-experience / user interface studies where they sat down and followed faculty and students to see how they actually interacted with a learning platform in order to think “outside the box” and totally re-vamp the interface…..hence the weirdness at first for us experienced users but a pleasant relief for new users!!!
It’s worth taking a quick peek at the Snap Theme developer’s presentation above to get an idea of why they built what they did based on studying professors and college students working with the LMS, and taking notes on what people actually clicked on.
To get started, try adding a header image to your course and an image to your first unit…this gives your users a "visual" anchor to help them navigate! 😊
You can also add in images to each section to help provide visual anchors and cues.
You should also check out the awesome SEARCH tool--it's very slick and makes navigating courses super easy!
Clicking on the "light bulb" icon marks a section as current, and will always load that section first in a course, making it easy for students to find your current section! Smart!
To see what a student sees (since you no longer have to turn on editing but are always in editing mode by default since you are the teacher—a smart change once you get used to it!!!), you can enroll yourself as a “fake student” using a personal Gmail account, or switch over to Student view in the Admin / Gear menu in the top right corner……
The new format of the Snap theme takes about a week or two to get used to it, but once you get in the groove you’ll come to appreciate how it is a much more well thought out and laid out interface compared to older LMS platforms….
Ultimate jury: STUDENTS. We have kids who had used our “old” Moodle platform, but this year when they logged into the new interface they “ooohed” and “ahhhed” over it and told us how much more they liked it!!!! And this is from teenagers who don’t want to be back in school now!!!
The pedagogic approach to SNAP development.mp4The Pedagogic Approach to Developing Snap
The Pedagogic Approach to Developing Snap
(super nerdy, but very interesting about the process used to help re-design and build Snap)
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