Setting up E-Mail and Web Page Accounts
This document contains four assignments: A, B, C, D.
Your first online project is to establish your own private Internet accessible E-mail account. Your account must be capable of receiving attachments. (An attachment is a file that is sent along with an e-mail message.) Even if you have an E-mail account now, I would advise setting up another one for this class.
There are several free E-mail services on the web such as www.hotmail.com and www.yahoo.com . I use Hotmail because it accepts 1Mb attachments.
Assignment A: Set up your e-mail account.
Go to one of these sites and set up an account. Make sure you keep your password secret. After setting up your account (just follow the directions), e-mail me an empty message with the word student in the subject window. My address for this class is [email protected] . Also, add me to your address book.
Assignment B: Have your parents set up an e-mail account.
Your second online project is to have your parents set up an e-mail account like yours. Please note that you should not know your parents’ e-mail password. When they’ve set up their account, they should send me an empty e-mail message with Parent of [your name] in the subject window. These empty e-mails are just so I can add both your and your parents’ e-mail addresses to my address book, and so I can check that you completed the assignment on time. I don’t plan to read them.
Building your first Web site
Next on the list, you will be constructing at least two websites this year. One website will be an individual one that you will start working on immediately. The other is a site that will be part of a group project. If you are very antisocial and prefer to work alone all year (I hope this isn’t the case but if it is…) your individual website better be DYNAMITE. The website is the showcase of your work for the year, and may be useful for explaining what this class was all about to the colleges you apply to. The content and look of your websites will be based on your work and your personality.
The first step to building a website is finding a place to build it. There are several free hosting sites on the web. My website is at www.fortunecity.com . I chose this location because it gives you 11Mb of web space, and more importantly, it allows you to publish (upload) from Microsoft FrontPage. FrontPage is available on our computers in class, and allows you to make and maintain complex web pages. (Although like all Microsoft products, it is evil incarnate:-) JK. JK.) Fortunecity also has a function that can automatically register your website with six major search engines.
Other website hosting locations are www.geocities.com and www.tripod.com. Geocities is well known, but it won’t accept uploads from FrontPage and its "Advanced" page editor gives you a limited number of graphics that take forever (some more than 5 minutes) to load. I’m not sure about the capabilities of Tripod, but they do offer some really great information in their help area.
Assignment C: Set up your personal website location.
My recommendation is that you use Fortunecity, so that I can be more help to you. Just follow the directions and you’ll be set up in about 5 minutes. (Judging from the spelling of some words at Fortunecity, they are either in Great Britain or a former English colony.)
Once you have a location, you need to learn a little about what goes into writing an impressive webpage:
First go to www.siec.k12.in.us/~west/online/steps.htm for some web design tips.
Another helpful tip site is
http://www.crpc.rice.edu/CRPC/Women/GirlTECH/Materials/eval.html
A rubric is an organized and systematic set of rules for evaluating a particular piece of work. For some very compact evaluation rubrics on web designs see:
1. www.westol.com/~jkearns/Hprubric.htm
2. www.esu3.k12.ne.us/curriculum/chpwkshp/rubric.html
3. http://edtech.sdcs.k12.ca.us/rubric/
4. www.sv400.k12.ks.us/tips/webpagerubric.html
I have listed these starting with what I judge to be the best, but they all have their strengths. We will probably use one or two of these rubrics to evaluate your webpages.
As a preliminary to evaluating your own website, you will need to evaluate some other websites.
Assignment D: Visit the sites below and using one of the rubrics, make a detailed point by point evaluation of two of the sites.
1. http://www.honda.co.jp/home/hpr/e_news/robot/index.html
2. http://home.earthlink.net/~henryarnold/
3. http://www.iff.fhg.de/iff/aut/projects/schreit/mag_e.htm
Please note that I will be asking you quiz questions about the content of all three websites above.
Good luck! You’ll be writing your own site soon!