HTML

• Once you have made a basic web page using a WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") editor such as Netscape Composer, you will surely want to expand your web page skills by learning a bit of basic HTML so that you can move into more advanced web applications.  A good place to start is a set of tutorials designed for teachers:
• Basic HTML
• Put Some Pzazz in Your Web Pages: Color, Graphics, Images and Sound
• How to Make an HTML Table
• How to do Interactive Web Forms
• See also Interactive Web-Based Activities for examples



• Want to know more?  A great web site for learning all the tricks of HTML is HTML Goodies by Joe Burns.  Written in simple, easy to understand language with ample examples and demos, all teachers will pick up lots of new tricks here.

• You might want to add some of those snazzy extras you see on other people's web pages, such things as chat rooms, threaded discussion groups and counters.  Ordinarily these would require some sort of intervention on the part of your server administrator.  But you can add them with no pain and no help by visiting this page that lists a wide selection of freebie extras for your web page.

• By now you have probably accumulated more bookmarks than you know what to do with.  Learn how to organize your bookmarks with this easy tutorial.  Or, if you work at more than one computer and you're going crazy trying to maintain multiple bookmark files in different locations, why not put them all on the web and maintain them from there so that no matter where you are, you have a consistent list of bookmarks.  Try using My Bookmarks to maintain your own bookmark file OR to make your bookmarks public and available to anyone who wants to use them.

• Wouldn't it be nice if your desktop were available to you wherever you logged in?  There is a nifty little PIM (Personal Information Manager) available online at the Magical Desk.  You can keep your calendar and to-do list online, you can file important files in the Magical File section, manage your mail, maintain an address book, and keep your bookmarks online at this site.  There is no charge for this nice service and you will receive 5 mb of free space.

ONLINE ACTIVITIES FOR INTERMEDIATE LEVEL FOLKS
 

Okay, let's get down to the nitty gritty.  You've got a basic web page (whether you did it with a simple editor like Composer or from scratch using HTML), and that's all well and good for you.  But what about your students?  How can you add interactivity to your web site without becoming a techie genius?  The sites listed below are specifically designed to help you add interactivity to your web pages with little or no knowledge of interactive forms done with HTM or JavaScriptL.  All are suitable for use by teachers whose own skills have reached the intermediate level.  Students require even less knowledge in order to navigate the activities created. Try some of these:
 

• For quick and dirty polls or surveys, BeSeen offers a free Quizlet that you can either embed in your page or have appear in a popup window.  Free for the asking, Quizlet is a simple way to query your visitors about an issue.  Much less useful than Hot Potatoes, WebGen, Matchmakers, or Quizcenter, nonetheless the BeSeen quizlet may indeed find its way onto your web page.

• Cool Tool allows you to create quizzes (using radio buttons, check boxes or text area boxes) on the fly.  The page generates the Javascript that you can then cut and paste into your own web pages.

• Hot Potatoes is one of the hottest software packages around for teachers these days.  The first thing you need to do is download the FREE software from the Half Baked Software page and install it on your computer.  On this same page, you will also find links to demonstrations and tutorials on how to use the software.  Using this package, you will be able to create six different types of activities: a multiple choice quiz, a short answer quiz, a jumbled sentence exercise, a crossword puzzle, a matching exercise and a fill-in-the-blanks (cloze) exercise.  The beauty of this package is that once you have created your exercise, the software creates the web page for you.  All you have to do is upload the three files created (one, in the case of the matching exercise) and voilà - instant interactivity!  Nothing could be easier.

• WebGen, a Java applet that runs within a Windows browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer and delivers             self-authored interactive exercises and tests, can also be download FREE of charge from the WebGen site.  Webgen offers comprehension exercises, fill-in-the-blanks (CLOZE), multiple choice, and any kind of transformation or focused question exercise, using any combination of text, sound and pictures. It also allows free composition and will e-mail the resulting text back to the student for printing or further work or straight to the instructor as a hand-in assignment.

• Dan Beeby of Haverford College has also developed a set of interactive exercises for teachers. Recently updated and expanded, his Makers will be a hit with busy teachers everywhere. Glossmaker will take a block of text and allow you to annotate or gloss words with text, images, sound or video.  Clozemaker will take a block of text and allow you to create a fill-in-the-blank (cloze) exercise.  Matchmaker will take questions and answers from a web form and create a matching exercise.  The Self-EvalMaker creates questions for which students supply the answers; they then compare their answers to yours.  MultiMaker creates multiple choice questions with feedback for each answer.  The beauty and simplicity of these activites reside in the fact that each one will create a web page for you. Be sure to look at some of his other "Makers" as well.  New drag-and-drop exercises have been added.  This page is evolving continually--check often!

• Webpractest is another website that allows you to create online cloze-type quizzes.  It is similar to Dan Beeby's Clozemaker, but much more cumbersome to use.  Try it if you like, but I think you'll prefer Clozemaker.

• Another integrated set of interactive exercises can be found at Web Author.  This set of tools has two advantages:  (1) many (but not all) of the exercises can be saved to your own server and (2) many (but not all) of the exercises include a "mail results to instructor" option that is not available in Hot Potatoes, for example.  I found them to be very intuitive and easy to use.  These tools will enable you to produce the following types of exercises:

• Web Pages for interactive reading
• Questions and answers or Translation
• Web exercise with instant feedback (for self-assessment)
• Yes/No or True/False type exercises without self-assessment
• Yes/No or True/False type exercises with self-assessment
• Multiple Choice questions with or without self-assessment
• Combination of all of the above
• Cloze exercises with choices in pull-down menus
• Cloze exercise with self-check option
• Cloze exercise with fill-in option
• Exercise for speed reading
• Make sentences from scrambled words (with self-check)
• Make sentences from scrambled words (without self-check)
  
  
• Funbrain.com provides an online site with access to thousands of quizzes designed by teachers world-wide.  You can create your own quizzes with Quiz Lab's easy-to-use authoring tool.  You can allow students to take quizzes over the Internet in the classroom, library, or at home. Quiz results are automatically emailed to you along with the most frequently missed questions.

• Quizcenter is another online web site that will allow you to create automatically online surveys and quizzes.  This site allows for self-correcting quizzes, quizzes that can be emailed to the instructor, feedback, incorporation of both images and text into the quiz, and several different quiz formats, including short answer (brief essay).

• A really nifty online service is found at Trackstar.  To quote the creators:  "TrackStar is an on-line interface that helps  instructors organize and annotate on-line resources (URLs) and file them in the TrackStar database. The list of resources, acting like a table of contents to the Track, remains visible throughout the lesson allowing the user/student to easily browse through the lesson and stay on track."  For example, using Trackstar, Paul Lanciaux has developed a site for teaching students about the paintings of Monet.  There are three frames on the page:  (1) At the top in a horizontal frame is first of all the URL for the painting that is shown in the main frame and a list of questions he would like his students to answer about the painting they are viewing; (2) in the main vertical frame on the right is a Monet painting; and (3) in a vertical frame on the left is clickable list of all the paintings in the track.  You can create your own lessons, or access those that others have already developed.

• Are you studying current events in your class?  Why not create your own newspaper with links to online articles about what's in the news.  You can do it quickly and easily by registering (free) with Crayon.net.

 

 

This page was created by Pat Pecoy
for MFL 195
Last updated February 1, 2000