Web Authoring

Wake County Magnet Program
Wake County Public Schools
June 5, 1996

The participants of this hands-on workshop will learn the fundamentals of Internet publishing while creating their own world wide web home page. Specific topics will include: text formatting, integrating multimedia, hypertext environments, elements of web page design. Participants should bring any text files on disk and pictures or photographs that they would like to include in their home page.

Morning

• Some Good Reasons for Teachers to Publish on the Internet
  • Communicate with classroom stake holders (students, parents, supervisors, and other teachers)
  • Develop multidimensional instructional materials
  • Publish student work (A new environment for students to work)
  • Professional (and not so professional) home pages (on-line resume)

• What is the nature of HyperText and HyperMedia?
• What are the fundamentals of HyperText Markup Language (HTML)?
• An Introduction to HTML tags and their functions.

• Begin work on individual Web Publishing projects.

• Some Considerations in Designing Web Pages
  • Keep the page neat and crisp.
  • Leave lots of white space.
  • Present short paragraphs with no more than three or four sentences.
  • If it is important to deliver lots of text, don't put it on the front page. Make it clear to the viewer that their next link will have lots of text...let them know what they are fixing to get.
  • Make the graphics small both in geographic size on the screen and in terms of disk space to cut down on the amount of time it takes the page to load.
  • Make the operation or interface of the page as simple as possible. Try to hold the number of operational links from any one page to no more than seven.
  • If you must have more than seven links, categorize to distinguish them from each other.
  • Try to provide links in each page that can carry the viewer to any other part of the web site without having to go back to the front page.
  • Try to convey a sense to the viewer of where they are in the web site.
  All of the above suggestions have exceptions. The over riding consideration is to accomplish your goal.

Afternoon

Components of a school home page:

1. Presentation and Content are Balanced.
2. Student Projects are Prominently Featured
3. Home page draws in outside visitors
4. Students' work teaches something "new"
5. Review, Feedback and Evaluation is Facilitated
6. Cross-section of subjects, departments, disciplines
7. Teacher Background Pages Included
8. Pages are Current and Properly Linked
9. Simple, clean, efficient and attractive layouts

Continue work on individual projects.

Resources:

• WRITING HTML was created to help teachers create learning resources that access information on the Internet.
• Beginners Guide to HTML -- from NCSA
• A Primer for creating Web Resources - Good meta-index for html/web creation info
• A Quick Review of HTML 3.0
• Selected HTML 3.0 Examples - Test pages illustrating some features of the HTML 3.0 draft specification.
• Macintosh Web Editors -- from Yahoo
• MS Windows Web Editors -- from Yahoo