Manhattan's Copy and Paste Commands
You are probably already familiar with the Copy and Paste features of your personal computer's operating system. For example if you wanted to take this paragraph and place it into a word processor, you would drag your mouse across the text, then select Copy from your web browser's Edit menu. After switching to your word processor, you could select Paste from the Edit menu and voila! the text is dropped into the document. When you select some text and then use the Copy command, the text is saved in a temporary storage area on your personal computer that can only hold one thing at a time. Under Windows, this holding area is called the clipboard. If you select additional text and use the Copy command, the new text replaces the text in the clipboard without warning. The Copy and Paste feature of your computer system, whether you use Windows, Macintosh, or Unix, provides you with a convenient way to reuse text within the same document, or to move the text between programs.
Manhattan's Copy and Paste function is very similar in concept to the Copy and Paste feature of your personal computer. Manhattan's Copy and Paste commands allow you to reuse messages within the same classroom. You can also use Manhattan's Copy and Paste to take a message from one classroom and post it in another. Also, Manhattan's Copy and Paste commands are what make Course Templates possible. Course Templates are slimmed down versions of ordinary Manhattan classrooms, without students, designed as a storage place for course materials. Course Templates are discussed in About course templates.
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The Copy/Paste commands are only available to teachers. Students will not see the Copy/Paste buttons described next! |
In a nutshell
Whenever you read a message you will find a button at the very bottom that reads
When you click on that button, Manhattan will copy the message, including all of its attachments, to a special place on the server called - you guessed it - your clipboard.
You'll get a message in a small browser window, like that shown below, when the process is complete.
Once you have copied a message to your clipboard, a
button that reads 
will now appear at the
top of every page throughout Manhattan that's used to
compose messages. When you click on that button, the screen
is refreshed, and the new compose message screen contains a
copy of the message stored in your clipboard. If there were
any attachments in the message, they also appear in a way
that allows you to either include or exclude them from the
new message. You can edit the message in any way you'd like
before clicking on the 
button.
Simple enough?
Some interesting applications
Scenario 1:You just spent 1/2 an hour carefully composing a new assignment in the Assignments module. The assignment included a large word processing document that took forever to send using your cranky old modem connection. After proofreading the assignment in Manhattan, you notice a glaring mistake.
While reading the assignment, click on the Copy this message to your clipboard button to copy the message and its attachment to your clipboard. Then delete the message. Compose a new assignment and click on Paste message from clipboard. Make the necessary corrections and send the message off.
Scenario 2:A student sends you a private message via the Post Office asking a question that would be of benefit to everyone in the class.
Copy the Post Office message to your clipboard. Start a new topic in the Class Discussion module and Paste in the student's message.
Scenario 3: A student posts a message as a new topic in the Class Discussion module that really should have gone under an existing topic.
Copy the student's message to your clipboard then delete the message. Get to the screen where you would compose a new message under the correct topic and Paste the student's message in.
Scenario 4: A student sends you her response to a homework assignment via the Post Office. Being the tidy type, you'd prefer to put it under the correct assignment and under her name in the Assignments module.
So do it! Copy the Post Office message to your clipboard. Switch over to the Assignments module, find her under the appropriate Assignment and click on her name to send her a new message. Paste in her assignment. (You also might want to send her a Post Office note gently reminding her how you'd like assignments to be returned in the future.)
Scenario 5: You teach three sections of Rocket Science 101 and by choice have each section in a separate Manhattan classroom, but need an easy way to post the same materials to each class.
Post the message to one Manhattan classroom. Read the message, and copy it to your clipboard. Enter each of the other classrooms and Paste the message to the appropriate module.
Things to note
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This feature is available only to the teacher. It was designed this way primarily because the teacher of the course has many more uses for the feature than would students.
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The downside of using Copy and Paste to move a message posted by a student from one place to another in a classroom, is that the new message will have you, the teacher, as the author of the new pasted message. (However, Manhattan does insert text like "Originally posted by Janet Student" at the beginning of the pasted message.) If you use one of the "gather" commands to find all of the messages posted by say, Janet Student, Janet's message that you moved and then deleted will not appear on the list.
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The clipboard resides on the server, not on your computer. This has a few interesting consequences:
Unlike your computer's local clipboard, Manhattan's clipboard retains its contents when you turn your computer off or when you exit your web browser. (Even restarting the server doesn't affect the clipboards since they are really files stored on the server.)
This also means that you have access to the same clipboard when you switch computers. For example, if you copy a message to the clipboard from your office computer, it is still there in your Manhattan clipboard when you login from your home computer.
Messages are copied to and from the clipboard quickly, at a speed that is independent of your connection to the Internet. You can re-post a message with a 3 Megabyte multimedia file attached using the clipboard just as quickly as you can re-post a message containing two words, regardless of whether you are working from a high speed network connection or a slow modem. That's because the message is never transferred to your personal computer's clipboard - everything happens 'out there' on the server.
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You will only see the Paste message from clipboard button if your clipboard is not empty. This is consistent in concept with how the clipboard on your own computer works, where the Paste command will not be available until after you put something in the clipboard with Copy (or Cut).
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There is a Clipboard Viewer available - click on the Configuration button on the Main Menu and look for it on the list. The Clipboard Viewer lets you see what is in your clipboard and gives you the option of deleting its contents.