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1) Keep your Internet (HTML) tests and study guides private - I’m sure that everyone would agree that life without our favorite search engine would be unthinkable. As wonderful as our search engine may be, it can create problems when it indexes your Web page. It could index the HTML tests and study guides that you publish to your own Web site. Someone searching the Internet could then inadvertently bump into your test and decide to link to it.

While it is not necessary to prevent this situation from occurring, there are a few preventative measures you can take.

• Create a folder on your Web server that will store all of your tests (e.g., name the folder tests: www.ivcc.edu/denis/tests).
• Place all ExamView tests in the new tests folder.
• Create a file named robots.txt and place the file in the top-level folder of the site (e.g., www.ivcc.edu/robots.txt).  The contents of the robots.txt file should read:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /denis/tests/

This will prevent all files in the tests folder from being indexed the next time the search engine visits your site (typically every 6-8 weeks).  For faster results, you can ask the search engine to remove the pages from its cache immediately once you have your robots.txt file in place. To do this, follow the instructions listed on the search engine’s site. URLs for two popular search engines are listed below:

Google: http://www.google.com/remove.html
altavista: http://addurl.altavista.com/addur/new

2) Control access to your Internet tests - Have you ever wanted to control who can access the HTML tests you post to your own Web site? If so, read on:

While you may not be able to make the required changes to your website yourself, you may be able to convince your webmaster to help out. Making the changes to protect your tests is actually a fairly simple one-time process. Once you set up your server accordingly, students will need a password to access the Internet tests on your server.

The steps to create a master password for a folder located on a server running Linux and Apache are listed below:

• Modify the main Apache configuration file to list all of the folders that you want to password protect. Be sure to “bounce” the server after making the changes. For each folder, the changes to the configuration file should look like:

  <Directory /www/html/my_folder_name>
  AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
  </Directory>

   

• In each folder, create the necessary access files.  By default, the main file is named .htaccess (but this can be changed by a setting in the main server configuration file).  A sample .htaccess file is shown below:

  AuthUserFile /www/html/my_folder_name/.htusers
  AuthGroupFile /www/html/my_folder_name/.htgroup
  AuthName "Enter a username/password to access the test"
  AuthType Basic

  <LIMIT GET POST PUT>
  require group students  # include the syntax and the group name (e.g., students)
  </LIMIT>

   

• Create the .htgroup file.  The group name comes first followed by the name of the group.  In the example below, the group name is "students" and this name must match the group name listed in .htaccess above.

  students: science

• Create the .htusers file using the htpasswd utility.  For each username listed in .htgroup, run htpasswd as follows:

htpasswd .htusers <user-name>

For example:

htpasswd .htusers science
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user science

You will need to enter the password for the science group when prompted above.

The following URL has some additional info:
http://www.oac.uci.edu/X/W6/httpd-howto/access.conf.d.html

3) Engage your students with MindPoint Quiz Show - Getting students motivated is always a challenge. However, when students are excited about the content and the classroom environment is engaging, learning seems to come easier.

One way to engage your students is to make learning fun.  While developing our new MindPoint Quiz Show software, we field-tested the program in a classroom environment. (For those of you not familiar with MindPoint Quiz Show, this program is a multimedia game that reads ExamView question banks.) Almost immediately, teachers noticed a difference. The competition from team play motivated students to spend extra time studying the material. As an added incentive, one teacher awarded a free homework pass to the winning team.

If you haven’t seen MindPoint Quiz Show, I would encourage you to check out the program (www.mindpoint.com).

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