[Yr7-10it] web presence

[Bill Kerr]

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, always envisaged
that the Web would be something that users would write to and that it
should be easy to write to. He wanted users to be active participants
not just passive readers and surfers.

It's important for student's to be able to publish their web pages out
there on the Web so they can look them up, show them off and work on
them outside of school hours. Conceptually and psychologically there
is a quantum leap difference between publishing on the Web compared to
just preparing something for the teacher, which never makes it to the
wider world.

I've discovered a way to enable students to do this which develops
naturally and hopefully would be a first step along the path of them
establishing a more permanent web presence that they will continue
with in their own time.

The first step is to create a <a href="http://flickr.com/">flickr
account</a> and publish some pictures you like on it.

Then you need to learn a little HTML. This is not too hard and there
are advantages of starting with HTML compared with visual design tools
such as Dreamweaver. HTML is fundamental and there are lots of web
applications, such as webnote and blogger, that you can do more with
if you know HTML.

Finally, you can create a <a
href="http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/">webnote space</a> and quickly
create a web presence. To publish a picture on webnote you look up the
URL of the picture on flickr and use the img tag and src attribute to
access the graphic.

Through this exercise my students create a web presence at flickr and
webnote, they have become web publishers. They have found out that
HTML is useful and can be quickly applied to publish a simple web site
which they can look up and work on outside of school hours. The whole
process is relatively quick and simple.

I asked my students (year 10) for permission to share their work, here
are some examples of what they created:

<a href="http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/krojinx">http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/krojinx</a>
<a href="http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/clayking">http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/clayking</a>
-- 
Bill Kerr
http://billkerr.blogspot.com/
http://intranet.woodvillehs.sa.edu.au/kerrbi/index.htm