What can I do on the Learning Site?

The TLM Learning Site is a powerful content management system which has customised assessment tools built into the tools and functionality.  The content links directly to the Markbook Site, which means that students can see what units they are working on, as well as the criteria that make up that unit's assessment.  Students can therefore create resources and upload work and link this directly to assessment criteria, and they can assess this themselves.  Assessors can then check this work and either agree or disagree and give some feedback.  All of the material is securely stored and any revisions made are fully tracked.  This means that learners and assessors can track any progress made if they use these facilities.

What resources can I make on the Learning Site?

The Learning Site has a number of generic pages as well as custom pages which can be used.  For example, you can make a blog page in order to quickly post and share some of your thoughts on the work you are doing.  You can make a regular page just to share some material, either as an assessor or as a learner.  There are also some custom pages, such as the Evidence Page or Public Page.  The Evidence page is linked directly to the assessment criteria for your units so it means that you can create a page and add some material, i.e. a presentation or image file.  You can then explain what the resource is and even assess whether or not you think it meets the criteria you link to it.  The Public Page is for you to create a page that can be edited by anyone else, a bit like a Wiki. You can within the site make a series of pages that you link together to make an electronic portfolio of all of your work eg by linking to evidence pages, blog entries and any other sources.  There is also a Book Page which creates a series of pages in the format of an electronic book with chapters and navigation buttons.  This could be useful if you create a user guide to support one of your extended projects.  In addition to these pages, you can also participate in a Forum, by creating a discussion, or replying to someone else's discussion.  You can also makes a Quiz or a Webform.  The quiz or webform would be useful as a questionnaire or for feedback on your work from your peers or people in the wider community. All of these tools are optional and can be used in conjunction with other web resources. 

How do I make a page?

As indicated already, there are different pages that can be made and each has a slightly different set of options, but the process is very similar.  For a regular page:

1. Go to the "Learners" link on the home page
2. Go to Create and then Regular Page
3. Click Regular page
4. Put a title for your page in the Title Box
5. In the larger box below with the name Body: type some text
6. Scroll to the foot of the page and click "Save"

Note that pages you create are listed in your account in the tab My Pages. You can also create new pages from here and do things like revert to earlier versions of them. 

For an ePortfolio:

First you need to create an account (How do I create an account?). An e- portfolio is basically a collection of web pages organised together. To create a new page hover your mouse over "Users", then "Learners" in the menu bar above and a pull down menu will appear as shown below, then select "Create Pages" and choose "E-portfolio".

Type in a title and the body text of the page (you can change these later). Note that you must provide a title and a body.

NB: Once you create the basic page, you can then go back and edit it with the full HTML tool bar.

In HTML, headings are marked with the tags <h1>, <h2>, ... down to <h6>. These tell the browser to put a heading style to the text when it is displayed. The top-level heading is <h1>. For example:

You make links with the <a> tag, like this: Please visit <a href=”https://theingots.org”>The INGOT</a> website. The "href" attribute ("hypertext-reference") contains the Internet address you want to link to. You can link to another web page or to a file you uploaded. See How do I let people download a file?.

There are two kinds of lists in HTML. Ordered lists are used to list a sequence of items with a specific order. For example, a recipe for boiled eggs:

Unordered lists are for listing items that have no particular order. For example, the primary colours:

An index page helps the user find all the pages and documents on a web site. A good index page will use headings to organise the content into sections, and use a bullet point list of links. Each link points to a page that forms part of your e-Portfolio.

For example:

		<h1>e-Porfolio Index Page</h1>

<h2>Silver Ingot Work</h2>
<ul>
 <li><a href="/community/blog/12">My Ingot blog</a></li>
 <li><a href="/community/node/342">My project proposal</a></li>
</ul>

<h2>My Art Work</h2>
<ul>
 <li><a href="/community/node/435">My paintings</a></li>
 <li><a href="/community/node/463">My final project</a></li>
</ul>

Note that node/342 is the identity of a page where the project proposal is located. Whenever you make a page the system will automatically create a unique node and number for it. You can give the page a name too if you want to. If you name your My paintings page paintings, the reference would be <a href="/community/paintings"> Note that if someone else has named a node paintings, you would have to use a different word. There is a field in every page creation to put in a word to replace the node number. 

For a blog page:

To create a blog entry, first login to the site and then click on "Create Pages" under the Users > Learners pull down menu as shown above (main manu on the page). Then choose "Blog Entry". Type in a title and the body text of the blog. Note:

• The title is only for this entry. This is not the title of the entire blog. The title for the entire blog will be something like "Joe's blog".
• You must provide a title and some information on the page.