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All change

Now that you have and idea about getting on to the web safely, you need to set up an account. It's time to change your team leader and note taker. First each person in the team say honestly what they thought about the last team leader based on the following:

• Did they give clear direction and keep the team on task?
• Did time get used well?
• Did they help make sure everyone was involved?
• Were they patient with members they thought were not helpful?
• What could they have done to make things better?

Now do the same for each team member using the following:

• Was the team member co-operative and helpful in contributing to the task?
• Did the team member support the leader or make life difficult for them?
• Did the team member accept help if it was needed?

Now the team overall

• Did the team get the jobs done successfully in good time?
• Was the team supportive of members with problems?

Ok, now rate the leader as ineffective, effective or outstanding but make sure you can justify this with evidence and keep the judgement a secret (confidential) within your team. You need to be able to keep secrets so take this seriously.

If the leader is rated ineffective what do they need to do to become effective next time? Look at the survey results above. Vision is about seeing what needs to be done and making sure it gets done. Energising people is getting them motivated, encouraging them and helping them to be successful.

Be positive and concentrate on improvement NOT making the leader feel bad, encourage them to do it better next time, be a leader of the leader! In this way the whole team can contribute to leadership, it's not down to one person.

Now rate each team member ineffective, effective or outstanding. Again make sure you can justify this with evidence from the previous discussions, not just because you might or might not like them. If any member is rated ineffective, it is up to the team and the team leader to do what ever it takes to help make that person effective. Everyone should want to be effective so let's help everyone do it because that will make the team more effective. Any bullying or nastiness should result in the person doing this being automatically judged ineffective themselves. Finally, there is a long way to go so don't worry about an ineffective judgement by your team at this point. You are here to learn and you can show them what you can do in the next tasks. (Hint: You are much more likely to be judged effective if you are friendly and helpful with other people than if you are bossy, conceited or arrogant - if you don't know what any of the words mean remember to use Wiktionary)

Now we will learn how to set up accounts on the INGOT site so we can go on to put your general notes on-line and share them. Note judgements about individuals is confidential and should not be put on-line. We have to learn what is sensible to go on-line and what is not? When is it appropriate to use technology when is it not? Which technologies are best for particular tasks?

Your new leader

It is the responsibility of the team leader for this stage to ensure that everyone sets up an account and understands what they can do with the account to edit and manage information. At the end of the section, the team will rate the leader and each other. So good luck.

Learning to use your account

Go back to the INGOT web site at theingots.org. You will be using this a lot so you might want to "Bookmark it".  If you don't know how to do this use the help on your web browser and your research team to find out. If you might not use that computer next time there are on-line book mark sites you can use so you can get your bookmarks from any computer.

Each team member should now have an account on the community site. You might want to refer to the information on this page while you are working. A good way to do this is to open this page in one tab of your web browser and then open a new tab and go to the INGOT web site and login. This will allow you to switc quickly from the information here to your work setting up your account. As a team you could set up one computer to view the information while other computers were used to set up accounts. It's up to you.

 Your user account page

You should get presented with this page when you first log in. You can get to it at any time by clicking the My Account link on the right hand side block.

Now look at the tabs that are labelled with the arrows in the screen shot on the left. The first one is view that gives you the view of the page. The next one is edit and this allows you to change information on the page.

 Editing your information

These are your main account details. You can change your password here - make sure it is something secure if you do change it. That means more than 8 characters and a mixture of small and capital letters, numbers and symbols. eg IloveIngots100% is easy to remember (but not secure now it's publicised on the web!) Thing is you can have a secure password without it being that hard to remember.

Your very own pages!

My Pages provides you with a list of all the pages you create on the site. To start with this list will be blank but it will increase as you add more pages. You can use this to find and edit pages quickly. Track page visits shows which pages you visited recently.

You can view a page by clicking view and go directly to the page by clicking on its name.

Personal files is where you can upload images and other files for use with your pages. All the screen shots on this page are files uploaded to my personal files and then linked to pages. Soon you will be able to do the same thing. 

Uploading files

There are a few things to consider when uploading files. With uploads there is a limit placed on the size of the files you can upload and link. It is not a good idea to try and upload very large video files to this site because it is not designed for a lot of people to all stream video at the same time. For this purpose, School Tube is a very good free site. School Tube is like You Tube but it is designed for schools with content checked so there is no need for schools to block the site.

High quality sound files can also be very big and these might be best hosted on School Tube too. Smaller sound files can be uploaded  but make sure they are yours to upload. You should not upload copyright work without permission of the copyright holder eg music mp3s from popular bands. A recording of you and your ream explaining how to do something is fine. We'll explain how to do this in later lessons.

Finally, for pictures on the internet there is a restriction to 500 pixels wide. There are two reasons for this. One is that the bigger the picture the longer it will take to load your pages and the other is that pictures need to fit on the page. If someone has a low resolution monitor big pictures might not fit on the screen. We'll go inot this in more detail later because understanding some of these technical things will make you a much more competent IT user in future and you will have skills and knowledge that is much more likely to survive the rapid changes that take place in the technological industry.

Upload a file

Just to test things out, find a small jpg file and upload it from your computer to your INGOT personal files space. Team leader make sure all are successful drawing on te team expertise.

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