Goals

The goals of the exam preparation presentations are:

• Help BYU students obtain a ham radio license, but keep things general enough so that they can be used outside of BYU
  
• Keep the slides as concise as possible, so they can be covered quickly
  
• Be usable by anyone with little preparation
• Publishable under a creative commons license

Helping with the presentations

How to volunteer

The presentations are stored in Google Docs, an online office suite that is very good at concurrent editing and collaboration.  You will need to be added to the list of editors before you can edit the document.  Send Jacob Brunson or any of the other presentation authors (or the discussion list) an email and you will be sent an invite to the presentation files.  All you need is a few minutes to contribute.

Ways to volunteer 

There are several different ways you can assist with preparing the exam prep presentations:

• You can prepare slides by adding textual content
• You can suppliment slides by adding photos and graphics
• You can prepare video presentation segments
• You can add speaker notes
  
• You can review and edit the slides

Lets explain each of these tasks and how you can go about doing them. 

Textual content 

This task looks over the exam questions and exam subject material and adds slides with bullet points or texts which explains the topics so that the students can answer the exam questions.  If a particular exam question is unique enough (in that it doesn't require any information covered in another question) then it may be practical just to create a slide with the exam question.  

All content you create must be your own words--no copy/pasting from another side or presentation.  This is so that we have full rights to distribute the content.  The exception to this is if you are copying an exam question, in which case you must display the full question number.  Another exception is if you are quoting an authority, such as Part 97, in which case you need to make sure you provide an adequate reference.

One of the places to start is with this word document http://n4maa.us/tech_ppt/T1_T0TechQ_Aonly.doc, which displays all the technician questions with only the correct answers.  Look through the slides and find a question group that hasn't been completed yet.  Then look at the questions from the word document for that group and start inserting content.

Graphical Content

Many slides may only display one or two bullet points.  You can add pictures to these slides to jazz them up.  Preferably, the picture should have something to do with the slide material.  

Other slides may need some graphical assistance in order to help present the material.  You can create content for these slides to help explain the idea.

In order to publish our presentations under a creative commons license, we need to be particularly careful with the graphics and photos we include in our presentations.  Sources probably should be limited to:

• Images and graphics that you have created yourself, from scratch
• Images and graphics officially published by the ARRL.  You should cite the ARRL as the source of the graphic on the slides
• Images and graphics published under a creative commons license.  Make sure you cite the license type and the source of the graphic on the slide.  You can search for creative commons content here: http://search.creativecommons.org/
  
• Images and graphics for which you have obtained permission from the copyright holder to use.  You should cite that you obtained permission and the source on the slide for which the graphic is used.

Do not include graphics that you do not have permission or license to use.

Video Content

 If you want to create some video content that explains something to help with ham exam preparation, you can upload your video to YouTube or Google Video (preferred, because it isn't blocked on campus) and then insert a link to your video into the presentation. If BYU ever stops blocking YouTube, these videos can be directly embedded into presentations slides.

You can also search Google Video and find other ham radio videos and insert links into the presentations.  Because we are only linking to the content instead of including the content in our presentations, we don't need to worry about obtaining rights to the content.

Speaker Notes

You can add speaker notes to each slide so that the presenter knows what to say when presenting the slide.  This text should be short, and should be written as if the presenter is speaking the text directly to the students.

Editing

If you don't want to provide new content, we can use your help to review the existing content.  Most importantly, make sure that there isn't redundant information.  Simplify all the slides so that they contain brief, concise, well-worded information.

Published Presentations

The following presentations are published.  If you find changes that need to be made, please request to be added as an author to the presentation.

• Technician Class Sub-Element 3 (Still could use some editing and graphics) 
• Technician Class Sub-Element 4 (For those with electronic backgrounds) (Another full presentation of this sub-element will be posted later which will include all the electronics)