It’s time for you to set up your new web site! We’re going to use a site called Edublogs, because it is built on the most popular web site building tool in the world, WordPress. With WordPress, you can create anything from a simple blog to a fully professional website.

Sign in here

or go to edublogs.org and click on “Log in” 

Sign in with your computer username with NO DOT and 2023.

ex: jrobson2023

Use your regular password.

Once logged in, make sure you are viewing the correct site. At the top, you’ll see My Sites. Choose the one with your name and go to the Dashboard, where you find all of the tools you need to build & maintain your site.

You can see how your site looks by clicking on your site name at the top of the screen (your user name)

If you click it, you’ll notice that your site looks TERRIBLE! Yuck.

Let’s fix that.

Go back to your Dashboard

On the left hand side, you’ll find Appearance. Hover over that and click Themes

Scroll around and find a good one. You’ll mostly be writing about your projects here, so you don’t want something too fancy. We’ll add some pictures here and there, but mostly this one’s about your reflections on your work, so don’t choose something photo-heavy.  Take your time and make a good choice. You can always change it later, but it’s always good to get it right the first time.

Some terrible choices for our purposes:

Here’s the one I’ll use. Feel free to use it if you really want to, but I’d love to see what you think looks nice, so I definitely encourage you to make your own choice. Mine is called Eduboard:

Once you’ve found one that you like, click Live Preview, and you can customize it a bit before your visitors will see it.

IMPORTANT note: each theme will have different customization options, so your theme may not look exactly like mine, but I’ll show you some options that should almost certainly be available for all themes.

SITE IDENTITY

This is basically the title and subtitle for your site. Right now your title will be your user name, but I’d love for you to change that. The purpose of this site is to post your work for ICT class, so your title should reflect that.

Here’s what it looks like:

If you don’t want to use the Tagline, you can leave it blank

There may be other options for your theme like the font, size, and placement, but not for every theme:

WIDGETS

Next, let’s edit the Widget areas

Widgets are basically little boxes that contain different links or site tools.

My theme’s default widget area:

Widgets can be found in several different spots on your site, so you may have to look inside of each area to see what’s already there.

For me, all of my current widgets are in Sidebar Area 1.

Right now, these are the ones that are enabled:

But a couple of them are really useless and annoying, so we’ll remove them.

Start with Recent Comments. Click on the little triangle to see your options.

Delete that!

Then look for Meta. I really hate when people leave this one active!

Delete it too!

After I’ve removed the most annoying ones, I’ve got these left. They work for me.

Feel free to explore the + Add a Widget area and see if there’s something that might be useful for you, and take a look at any others that your theme may have active automatically and decide whether they actually serve a purpose or not.

IMPORTANT: Just like when you’re working on a Word document, you need to SAVE your work. It also needs to be PUBLISHED in order for people to see your changes on your site. At the top, there’s a button that will do both for you!

Here’s what mine looks like now:

Here’s a video version of this information that I made years ago at another school. Note that some things have changed since then!

Using Microsoft Word, you will be creating a trading card (hockey/football/Pokemon/etc.) depicting yourself, a celebrity, family member, Mr. Robson, or someone you make up. The information does not have to be accurate, it can be creative.

You will NEED TO INCLUDE:

• Shapes (line and fill changed)
• Pictures (preferably legal!) – You MUST include attribution (source) information as a hyperlink for whatever pictures you choose
• Text box with biography
• Text box with some sort of statistics.
• Statistics MUST BE LINED UP BY SETTING TABS!

For example:

I have shown my invisible characters to show you the setup. As you can see in the table at the bottom of the page, I’ve hit Tab ONE time before & between each bit of information.

I won’t be showing you how to do this one step-by-step! All of the tools and skills you need were covered in the last assignment. If you need help or advice, I’m more than willing to help, but if you have no idea how to do this, look back at the Wordskills assignment!

I’m always amazed at how little many students know about how to properly use some of the most commonly used computer programs in the world. We’ll spend a bit of time going over some of the cool things that you can do in Microsoft Word because you will encounter it so often throughout your life. It is possible to design and put things together in Word and PowerPoint, but if you have access to Adobe applications (or other free alternatives) you’re always going to come up with better results.

By the way, you can access and install Microsoft Office applications for free from your school account. They are normally quite expensive to buy, so if you don’t have Office applications at home yet, this is a great opportunity to get them for free while you’re a student.

Office login (u.user@sjasd.ca)

In order to complete this assignment, you will need to download the file from HERE

The first thing you need to know is that although you can use Word and other Office applications in a web browser without installing them on a computer, the online version is not nearly as good. Make sure you are opening the file in the Word application on your computer, NOT in your browser!

Open this:

The file is pretty self-explanatory and will allow me to see how much you know. Do as much as you can on your own, but we will go over it in class as well.

If you need help, I have some video tutorials, but they are a little old so some program features may look or work a bit differently than they did when I made the tutorials:

part 1

part 2

part 3

Make sure that you’ve read and completed the first part of the assignment before you try this one. You won’t be able to do this right unless you correctly send the first message!

Part one instructions

After you send me the email described in part one, I’ll send you a Reply, which I then want you to Reply to.

When I send you my reply, you’ll see it in your Inbox. It’ll look something like this:

Click on it to open the message and read it

There are two ways to reply:

with the first curved back arrow at the top:

or with the button at the end that says Reply

You need to be able to see my message because I want you to cut out the parts that aren’t relevant to your reply. To do that, you’ll need to click on the three dots to Show message history:

You should now see my message below a line. If you missed it above, read the message. You’re going to select ONE of the questions I asked and respond to it.

Emails can get super long and annoying if you don’t cut out all of the old and unnecessary bits from your reply. Getting in the habit of erasing all of the parts EXCEPT what you’re responding to is super important!

Leave the information about who sent the message when alone. Highlight the parts of my message that you don’t want to reply to and delete those. All you’ll be left with is something like this:

Then go back up to the top, above the line, and write another email with a greeting, the answer to the question, a signoff, and your name.

It should look something like this:

Once you’ve got that AND ONLY THAT, press Send and send it back to me! I probably won’t respond this time (but I might) but I will give you a mark for doing this correctly!

Marks for the assignment look like this:

Outlook Email – Marks

/1 – subject line is correct
/1 – suitable greeting
/1 – blank line
/2 – Message body is correct.
/1 – blank line
/1 – Sign off
/1 – blank line
/1 – your name

/9 – TOTAL

REPLY:

/1 – suitable greeting
/.5 – blank line
/1 – Message body is correct.
/1 – blank line
/1 – Sign off
/.5 – blank line
/1 – your name
/3 – original email snipped so that only the question being responded to is present

/9 – TOTAL

It’s time you social media DM experts finally got around to writing a proper email. Email is a very common, very valuable method of communication, but a lot of people don’t know how to do it well. We’ll make sure that you do after this assignment.

Go to your Outlook inbox

If you need to log in, it’s your school email address, which is your computerusername@sjasd.ca. ex: j.robson@sjasd.ca

The first step is to click New Message

The email address you are sending the message to goes in the “To” box

There are two ways to input a destination for the email. You can type in the email address VERY CAREFULLY! If even one letter is wrong, your email could end up being sent to someone you don’t even know, or it could just not go through.

You will also have an address book, which makes it easier to email people you have corresponded with in the past or people who are part of your school community. All of your teachers are already in the address book! All you have to do is start typing in a teacher’s name, and it will pop up.

BE CAREFUL that you choose the right address! When you type in rob, you will also see Mr. Robertson, or another similar name. You will also see my son, who is a student. Make sure you choose the right one!

If you can’t find my email, you can copy and paste one of the following:

jeffrey.robson@sjasd.ca

misterjrobson@gmail.com

If you wanted to send a copy of the email to someone else as well, you could put that in the CC (Carbon Copy) box. (you don’t actually have to do that here, but just so you know)

You can even send a “secret” copy to someone using BCC (Blind Carbon Copy). I use this option when I’m sending a message out to all of the parents in a class. When I do it this way, the parents don’t get to see the names and email addresses of everyone I’m sending the message to, which is super important for privacy reasons.

The next important box is the Subject line. This needs to be kept short and needs to tell the person you are emailing what it is that you are emailing about. You do not write a whole sentence in there, just a few words that tell the person why you’re contacting him/her. Click in the Add a subject box:

MAKE SURE YOU PUT IN THE CORRECT SUBJECT LINE HERE! I’m going to get over 300 emails, so you have to help me out and make sure you do this exactly right or your email will get lost in my cluttered inbox and you will not get the marks!

Your subject line should be ICT Outlook Email. (e.g. 601 Outlook Email or 819 Outlook Email, etc.) You can copy and paste the words below if it’s easier.)

ICT Outlook Email

ex: 

Next you will greet the person you are writing to. Most of the time, we use the word Dear, but you could also use Hello, or Greetings, or something like that. Again, if it’s easier, you can copy/paste from here:

Hello Mr. Robson,

Leave a blank line and then start writing your email.

For your message, I would like you to tell me about something you’re interested in or something you know a lot about, and why you enjoy it. Tell me all about your favourite video game, book, anime, ice cream flavour, or whatever you want! I want to know a bit more about what you like.

Your message doesn’t have to be more than a few sentences. You could do something similar to this:

Then leave another blank line and sign off. Some common ways of signing off are:

You can also use things like Thank you, All the best, See you tomorrow, etc.

Then you’ll leave another blank space and write your name: (just your first name is fine, but you can put the whole thing if you like. Your full name is more formal and sounds more “proper” but you would be more informal and friendly with someone you know.)

Your complete message will look something like this:

If you want, you can take some time to make your message look better by using some of the formatting tools available at the bottom:

Read your message over to make sure that your email makes sense and doesn’t contain any obvious errors. Spelling doesn’t really count for this assignment, but your email will ALWAYS look better if you try to spell things correctly and format everything right.

Once you’re done, click Send!

Once you’ve done that, I will send you a message back, which you will Reply to for the second part of the assignment!

In the previous set of instructions, we covered how to choose your theme and customize some of the options. Now let’s start putting stuff on the site!

When you first visit a website, there’s usually some sort of Home page that welcomes you and explains a bit about the site.

My website home page looks like this: http://www.misterjrobson.com/

That PAGE rarely changes. It stays the same unless there’s some new bit of information that I need or want everyone to know.

You should set up something similar. In your dashboard area, click on Pages:

Right now you’ve only got one page, a Sample Page

IMPORTANT SETTING: There are two ways to edit pages & posts. The modern way is with this fancy Block Editor thing.

I don’t like it. At all. I’m old, I guess. You could probably figure that thing out better than I can. I like the Classic editor. If you like to follow my instructions step by step, you might want to turn on that classic editor:

If you want to turn that on (recommended!), go into Settings, and go to Writing:

The default looks like this:

I love that Classic editor, so I turned that on:

Make sure you press that blue Save Changes button!

If you’ve done that, you can edit your pages and posts two ways. I prefer the classic editor:

If you don’t turn on that editor, yours will probably look like this:

When you edit a page with the Block Editor, it looks like this:

The classic editor looks like this:

Right now your only page is called Sample Page. Yuck! Let’s change that to Home.

Your home page welcomes people to your site and explains what it’s for. So, what will you use this web site for? (There is a correct answer here!) I would also like a link to my website.

My example looks like this:

I will use this site to show my students what to do on their sites. I will try my best to explain things and show examples that they can follow and hope that they will try to do a good job on their own sites. I’ll include good quality pictures and detailed explanations, as well as links to resources that might help.

Here’s some more information about my ICT class: Mr. Robson’s Site

To create that link:

Go find my website (or click my link above…). Highlight the URL (address) and right-click/copy or Ctrl + C

Highlight the words you want the link attached to and click the chain in the editor:

Paste the address in the little box that pops up. I like to click the Link options button…

I like my links to Open in a new tab:

Make sure you click Update to save:

A web page is pretty boring without any photos, so let’s add one (or more!)

As often as possible, we will use Creative Commons images. These are ones that we are legally allowed to use. When you grab a photo off of Google Images, you very rarely have permission to do so; it’s actually rather illegal to use an image without permission, because all images (and movies and music and tv shows) belong to the creator, so those people hold a copyright. As soon as you create anything, including a photo, you own the rights to that thing and you can control how it is used. So technically if you take that Fortnite image off of The Internet without permission, the creators of Fortnite could come after you and demand that you remove it and even pay them for what you’ve done. You don’t want that.

Luckily, some creators label their work saying that they encourage you to use what they’ve created. These creations are called Creative Commons. There are many great sources of Creative Commons content on my Links page under “Copyright Free Content.”

Normally, we’d go to one of those sources to download an image and we would make sure that we gave credit to the creator and/or the website where we found it.

My favourite source of Copyright free/Creative Commons photos is UNSPLASH

Go to Unsplash and find a photo that you would like to showcase on your site. When you find one that you like, look for the arrow on the bottom right corner and click that to download:

The ones that say Unsplash+ have a button that says Unlock. You have to pay for those ones, so pick something else:

When you download a photo, the creator info will pop up. You should always credit the creator! Copy that info now or leave that little window open!

The EASY WAY to add your photo to your page is just to DROP IT ON!

You could also click the Add Media button:

You can go to Upload files:

Then either drop the photo on or Select Files:

The photo will likely take a moment to upload, but soon you will see it in your Media Library, where you will select it:

I like to change a couple of things. You will need to add the Creator credit. I usually do it in the Caption box. It’s really easy if you use that creator info box on Unsplash and Copy that info:

Then go into the Caption box and paste it there:

Another way to add credit for where you got your photo is to link to it. Every photo can have a link attached in the ATTACHMENT DISPLAY SETTINGS.

I like to Link To and choose Custom URL and paste in the address of the photo:

My sample site now looks like THIS: https://westwoodgt.edublogs.org/

Remember to click that Update button to Save!

Next, make sure that your Home page shows up when people first go to your site!

Go under Appearance on your Dashboard sidebar and choose Customize:

Choose Homepage Settings:

and make sure that your homepage displays A static page, then select that page that you just edited:

Don’t forget that you need to press the blue Publish button to Save!

QUESTIONS