System for making LaTeX teaching material
Rationale
As a teacher at TAFE and at the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education, I wanted to create a system that would allow me to start teaching a new topic quickly and easily. The aims:
- Use LaTeX
- Want it customisable, with good quality
- Produce video slides, handouts and transparencies from one source
- Enable the handouts to contain additional material, such as workshop exercises, or questions for the students to answer to test their own understanding during the class
- Ease of management: want to be able to quickly start a new topic, quickly be able to build everything.
I originally used seminar, then Prosper, then HA-prosper, and finally LaTeX Beamer. I settled on using LaTeX Beamer because it allows the use of normal LaTeX commands and allows much greater flexibility than its predecessors. It is also actively developed.
Download
teaching-template-system-0.2.tar.bz2
How to use it
Initial Customisation
- Untar the files
- Edit the files: replacing my name with your name, removing other authors, choosing a suitable layout, and doing whatever you like to customise to your own liking.
Starting a New Teaching Topic
To begin a new teaching topic, in the top level directory containing a Makefile, do:
make my-topic-name
This will create a subdirectory my-topic-name containing the
contents of the template directory with the headings edited
to my-topic-name.
You then go into that directory and edit the file
my-topic-name/my-topic-name.tex.
Typing make in that directory will produce three pdf files and a postscript file:
- my-topic-name-beamer.pdf
- the slides to show using a video projector
- my-topic-name-handout.pdf
- a pdf file suitable for printing as a handout to the students
- my-topic-name-handout.ps
- The same, ready to send to a postscript capable printer.
- my-topic-name-trans.pdf
- the slides suitable for printing to transparencies, if there is no video projector available.
If you type
make
in the top level directory, then it will bring all the teaching material in all the subdirectories up to date, compiling anything that it is necessary to compile.
Browse the Files
You can browse the files.
Support
This system is supported. Please write to Nick Urbanik and ask any questions you like about this system and how to adapt it to your needs.