ford truck Week 2

Agenda

  1. Learn about RSS and get an aggregator
  2. Begin Flash training
  3. view PPT tutorials

Fun

If you have kids (or you are one) the Yuckiest Site on the Internet from Discovery Kids is always good yucky fun.

Has anyone used this i-neighbors site? I'd be interested to know if this has caught on.

Here's a neat Flash site with video of an eagle flying, from the eagle's point of view. Fast connection recommended for viewing the video.

If you are new to computers and the Internet, visit Newbie.org.  Spend some time visiting the links on this helpful site. Be particularly familiar with these terms.

Resources

 

Last week we began the course, and you became very familiar (I hope) with how the course will operate. You also need to know how I grade, and about all the major assignments and due dates.

Get an Aggregator

An aggregator (also known as a news reader or RSS reader) is a software program that collects news from all kinds of web sites. An explanation of RSS and aggregators is here on the Answers page. Read the short articles there. Then download an aggregator and give it a try. You may find some sites with RSS feeds that interest you. Note: don't get too concerned if you can't get it to work right away. This is not a "mission-critical" assignment. It is more of an experiment to expose you to the next big thing on the Internet, which is RSS (Really Simple Syndication). If you aren't using RSS yet, you will be soon. So sit back, relax, and give the aggregator a try.

I use a tool called weblog (blog) to post news about my work and about the field of IDT. The blog is called Teachable Moment. I will post some commentary here from time to time. Use the aggregator you downloaded, and subscribe to my blog by using this subscription link. (Note, this link will look like a bunch of jumbled text in your browser because it is not HTML. It is an RSS feed that you plug into your aggregator). If you don't understand what I'm talking about here, please read the RSS articles.

 

In addition to these resources, there are a variety of journals available through the Web. For this class, you'll want to focus exclusively on refereed (peer-reviewed) resources. When a journal is described as refereed or peer-reviewed, this means when a journal editor receives a manuscript, the editor sends that manuscript out to three or four experts in the field who review the manuscript to determine if it is worth being published.

Web Publishing

As you know from the course policies, in this course you need to be able to publish web pages. If you are new to creating web sites, I recommend you begin by using Netscape Composer (part of Netscape Communicator) to create your HTML documents. You may then want to move on to a more advanced tool such as Dreamweaver.

It is not a good idea to use Microsoft Word or Excel, or PowerPoint for that matter, for creating web pages. These are not HTML tools, and they create non-standard documents that do not display correctly in various browsers.

Here is a composer tutorial from Netscape. There are many more tutorials on the Web, as a simple search will reveal.

Composer is a free web page editor that comes with the Netscape Communicator package. If you don't have Composer/Communicator, you can go directly to Netscape.com and download it. This is a large file so it will take some time depending on your connection speed.

If you have experience with web design, you may use other web page editing programs or plain HTML.