Quick Guide to Xerte Online Toolkits

Quick guide to Xerte online toolkits

Community

The most useful guides are developed and maintained by the community. A good starting point is at

Logging on

The Birkbeck site is located at you should login with your ITS username and password. It seems to work best with Internet Explorer, you may find you cannot click on an existing learning object to edit it in Firefox.

You are advised to logout whenever you are not using the tool, otherwise you are automatically logged out after a period of inactivity. Nothing on screen will change to indicate that, but you will be unable to open or create learning objects and will see error messages. For instance, opening the properties of an object will give the message ‘Sorry you do not have rights to this template’.

Outside College

To logon from a computer outside Birkbeck, you should create a VPN link, and make sure you have connected to that (as well as your usual internet connection) first. See

Creating an object

On the right-hand side, click on Create under Xerte Online Toolkit.

Enter a name in the box that appears and click Create Project. The new learning object will appear - you may need to enable popins in your browser.

Sharing an object

You can share a learning object with anyone who has logged in to Xerte, but only after they have logged in for the first time. You may both then work on the contents.

Click on the learning object name and then on properties.

Under Shared settings, begin typing the person’s name – it will only appear once they have logged in to Xerte once. Give an object is similar, but allows you to transfer an object to someone else.

Exporting an object

Once you have finished creating an object, you should export it for inclusion on a website.

From the main Xerte view, click on the name and then on properties.

Click on the Export option and then on the zip export link.

Save that file. Note that if you are uploading the zip into a VLE such as Blackboard, you may need to tell Blackboard to start with the file ‘index.htm’

Including a learning object in Blackboard

There are two ways to show an object in Blackboard – either a direct link Xerte online toolkits, or by exporting the object and importing it into Blackboard. Using the latter method, you would have to export/import the object each time you wanted to change anything. With the former, any changes are immediately reflected.

Link

To link an object, first set the file to be public.

• In Xerte OT click on the learning object, then on properties
• Choose Access
• Tick Public
• Click Save

You should then copy the URL of the learning object.

• Click on Project
• Right-click on the URL shown ( and choose Copy Shortcut

Within your Blackboard course, go into edit view, add a new External Link and paste the URL previously copied into the URL box.

Export/Import

Once you have exported a file as a zip, you can import that file into Blackboard for students to use it.

Within Blackboard, click on Edit view

Click on +Item to create a new link in Blackboard

Fill in section 1 as you like

Under section 2, browse to find your zip file and give the link a name. Most important, choose ‘unpackage this file” next to special action.

Click submit

You will then be asked which file Blackboard should start with. Scroll down the list to find index.htm (it may be quickest to click into the list then press i to get close to it). Select that file and click submit.

(Slightly) More advanced Xerte

There are some tips in the learning object at