ITQ course page 3 - Checking what everyone knows and can do, making pages and putting in content

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Now it is time to change your team leader again.

But first we need to evaluate the performance of the team.

First the leader

  • 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 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?

Now rate the leader as ineffective, effective or outstanding and the same for team members as before. The most important thing is to improve. Do you think you made any improvements from last time?

Checking what you have learnt

The leader for this exercise has the first task of checking to see what has been learnt.  Get each team member to make 3 questions about setting up an account on the INGOT site. They can refer back to the instructions in the last section. Make one question easy, one question medium and one question difficult.  Once these questions are done team leader organise swapping questions so each person has not go their own questions. See if anyone can answer all three questions. Now check to see if any of the questions were the same or nearly the same. Were there any questions that you disagreed about the answer? Finally, team leader with the help of your team put a 10 question quiz together that could be used by other people with easy questions to start and hard questions at the end. If possible compare your quizz with those of other teams in the class. Team leader should double check now that all team members can

  • Follow guidelines for setting up their user account
  • Say why it is important not to give out personal details on the internet
  • Give some examples of behaviour that should be reported as going against the Acceptable Use Policy
  • Say what terms and conditions are necessary for using the INGOT web site
  • Say how to upload a picture to their personal files

Only proceed when you are sure that everyone is ready for the next task.

Making pages and putting in content

Now you need to go back to the INGOT community site and login.

Create pages menuOnce logged in you can create a new page on the web site. To do this, go to Learners on the menu bar and then follow the arrow right on create and then down the sub menu to Regular Page.

There are different types of page that we can create so to start with we are just going to do a Regular Page. We'll use the other possibilities later.

A regular page is created by you and only you can edit it, but other people can view it. The way the site is set up, assessors and administrators can make comments on the content of your page and attach them and you can reply.

We are going to use this later with project work so that your work can be checked on line and we can give you a certificate if you show you know and can do certain things.


Now let's look at the page and putting in the title and content.

You should get a page with the top looking like the screen shot on the left.

You must put in a title for your page so we are going to make this page about your favourite music, sports star or celebrity. Put their name in the title space.

Language is set to neutral so leave that as it is. More advanced users can set the language and then othr people can translate the page so it will appear in the new language. The internet is global so web sites have to be able to cope with many languages.

Below language is an edit ruler a lot like you will find in any word processor. Creating pages can be done just like in a word processor but there are a few things that make web pages different from word processing pages and to be competent with publishing on the web, it is important to know about them. To start with just type in a sentence about your chosen celebrity. Team leaders make sure all the team has got to this point and knows what to do. Help anyone catch up if they have been left behind.

 Now you should have a page that looks like this

I have chosen Hayden Panettiere as my celebrity. You can choose anyone you like, this is just an example to show how to do things in the Drupal page editor.

You can just enter the title in the title box and then type into the editor like in a word processor. Don't try and put any styles or effects in yet, just the text and press enter to start a new line.

This view is just the top part of the page, now let's look at the bottom half.


Celebrity page screenshot lower half

 

 Note the link to disable rich text. More about that in a minute.

 

The Log message is optional you can make notes here about your page content. it won't be seen by normal viewing, just when you edit.

 This sets the URL path and you need to think about this a bit. In Drupal all pages have a unique web address or URL. Something like http://theingots.org/community/node/9315. Every page has a different node number but you can use a name instead of a number so it is easier to remember. So here I have put Hayden_Panettiere because then putting /community/Hayden_panettiere will go straight to this page. /community/node/9315 will have the same effect. The main problem is if someone else has had the same idea and put the same name for a page. when you submit the page you wil get a message saying you can't use that name so you will have to choose another. The Preview button lets you see what your work looks like without saving it. The Save button will save it. Note to the right of your screen there is Auto Logout and a timer. This will automatically log you out if you don't save your work regularly and you could lose work so save regularly. The reason to auto log out is because if you leave yourself logged in and someone else comes and uses the computer after you they will be able to get into your account. Always log out at the end of a session and shut down the browser to be sure.

Editing using HTML

The editing ruler makes it easy to add styles to your work just like in a Word Processor. However these editors all have some limitations and if you know a bit about how web pages work it will give you much more control and you might even want to become a professional web developer. The styles and layout of web pages is determined by tags. Tags are the basis of HTML and HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It is the programming language for web pages and it is actually quite simple. In the Regular Page you created click the disable rich text button at the foot of the text editing box. You should get a screen that looks like this.

 

 It looks very similar but the spacing out has gone. Notice the <p> tag at the beginning. HTML tags can be recognised because they are in angle brackets, the < and > symbols on the keyboard. <p> tells your web browser to start a new paragraph. and </p> telss it that it is the end of the paragraph. when the text and tags are displayed the browser just converts the tags into actions. The rich text editor does the opposite. It converts the layout you produce in the edit window into HTML tags. There are two possible problems. Sometimes the editor does quite do what you intended. You can get some bits of layout that stubbonly refuse to do what you want! If you know a bit of HTML you can always go back to the tags and check what is happening and fix the problem. There are also some more sophisticated things that you can do with HTML beyond the capabilities of the editor such as adding interactivity to your page using Javascript and we will look at this later on when you get more confident with basic HTML and web pages. None of this is specific to Drupal, HTML is used in every web development environment. Drupal has certain advantages though. It is free and Open Source, and it does a lot of the work for us in managing the pages and content we produce. Why pay money for expensive software when there are tolls of this quality available for free?

Let's try making a heading. Switch back to the rich text editor by clicking the link at the bottom of the text editing box. Now go to the name of your celebrity and drag the mouse across to highlight the name.

 Now go to format as shown in the screen shot to the left and choose Heading 2 from the menu. The menu provides a few different heading styles that are designed to go with the current theme in Drupal. The theme is wha gives the general look and feel of the INGOT web site. Drupal supports many themes and you can even design your own so your web site can be absolutely unique. It might seem that there is not much choice but one key rule of using styles is to use few an be consistent. It will make your work look a lot better.

So we have chosen Heading 2 and appled it to our celebrity's name to make a title for the page. It should look like the next screen shot.Heading 2 style applied

Now click to switch from the rich text editor back to the text and HTML. It will then look like the next screen shot.

We now have some extra tags. <h2> and </h2>. This tells the page to switch Heading 2 style on and then to switch it off again. So you can see how simple it is to make HTML tags.

Team leader should make sure all the team are fully confident with applying simple styles using the rich text editor. Try some styles, formats, fonts and fon size and see what the botttom row of icons on the ruler do. Switch to the HML version to see what tags are produced. Try changing the tags by editing them in the HTML text rather than using the rich text editor. Try marking text and clicking B, I, etc on the second row up. Don't go to the linking tool and beyond at this stage. The linking tool is the picture of the earth with a chain link next to it. We'll check this out later.

Team leader check that all have done this because it will become important later.

We are now nearly ready to make a first complete web page. Next we will look at putting in pictures and making links to other information on the web and then we will have all the basics needed to build a web site.

 

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