November 2007
Monthly Archive
Today we talked about design vs. content in regards to building webpages.
Content - the text and supporting information that is displayed.
Design - how the information is displayed.
When HTML first appeared the design and content was intertwined - creating blocks of code that controlled what was displayed and how it did so. Realizing that designers and copyeditors have completely different priorities and skill sets, the international group of people who create coding language standards came up with CSS - a way to control the design without riddling html with lots of design elements.
We learned how to call CSS: <style type=”text/css”> (this is an html tag that explains the type of style to apply will be text based CSS)
We learned that, just as html starts and ends tags with a < and a >, CSS starts and ends its declarations with brackets { css goes here }.
Also, we talked about how CSS controls HTML and tried the following:
body {background:red; color:blue;}
img {border:1px solid green;}
—–
To write and test our code we used Notepad and Firefox. We would add code in Notepad and then switch to Firefox to test our efforts and then back to Notepad for more editing. Along the way we picked up some keyboard shortcuts that allow us to edit and test without using the mouse. Specifically,
Control + S = Save
Control + R = Refresh web browser
Alt + Tab = switch between programs
posted by Jac de Haan
This week the students that have been studying the One Laptop Per Child program presented their finding to Ted, our Head of School.
The groups began by education Ted about what the OLPC program is and described the specific hardware and software configurations in the XO laptop. They then discussed the problem of the digital divide and how the OLPC is trying to offer a solution.
Finally, both groups recommended that Billings participate in the limited G1G1 program, in order to help a student in a developing nation and also to get an XO laptop for the school, which can be used to further educate our community on the program and our learning. Emiko suggested that the laptop could be taken to Billings open houses to show prospective students the types of programs we engage in here at school and also to raise awareness of the project.
The OLPC students also researched the latest news related to the program, and found quite a few stories:
posted by Jac de Haan
Building on last week’s learning of URLs, this week the 6th grade learned about HTML, the language that hides behind websites and displays information in a way that humans can easily understand it.
We started by realizing that all webpages are effectively downloaded to a computer before they can be displayed. This means that if a website has a virus, when visiting that site we are inviting the virus onto our own computer. We also found out that by selecting “View>Source” or “View>Page Source” from a browser’s menu, we can see the raw code that instructs the program how to display its content.
From there we jumped into writing our own webpage, using HTML. The following includes the tags and structure we have learned so far:
<html> <–this code tells the browser that the following is in the html language
<head> <–this begins the head (notes to seach engines, calling scripts, etc)
<title> </title> <–this is the page’s title
</head> <–this notes the end of the head
<body> <–this begins the body of the site (the area where things are displayed)
anything you want to show up in a page
</body> <–this ends the body
</html> <–this ends the html language
Some things we’ve learned about html:
- tags are instructions that tell the computer how to show information
- tags begin with a “<”, which we are calling carrots or crocs
- tags end with a “>”
- whenever we have an opening tag (<title>), we have to close it later (</title>)
- excepting the above rule are tags which don’t contain anything, such as line break (<br/>)
- tags can have more than one word in them (<a href=”url.com”>)
posted by Jac de Haan
A Dutch teenager was recently arrested for his online activities. He is a member of Habbo, an online community designed for teens where they can chat and play games (check wikipedia’s Habbo Hotel entry for more information).
In this virtual world, as in Club Penguin and Second Life, you can exchange real-world money for virtual items such as cooler clothes for your avatar, a virtual place to hang out, tickets to an online concert, etc. The teenager stole digital furniture from other players. The other players had paid real money for their pretend furniture - so he had stolen something that they had purchase, constituting theft.
Stealing is illegal. What are some other illegal activities that someone might be convicted of even if the occurrence only happens online?
Original article: BBC news
posted by Jac de Haan
What is a URL (uniform/universal resource locator)?
That is how we began a week of discussing web addresses. It seems like a simple question, but from this starting point we examined:
- how a site address is put together,
- what its different parts mean,
- how to use a url to make a guess as to a site’s validity
- how urls are like a contacts list in a cell phone
Some students also got the chance to beta test Anti-Phishing Phil, a game being developed by Carnegie Mellon’s CUPS lab that helps students spot questionable internet addresses. All are encouraged to try playing the game in their free time.
posted by Jac de Haan
California Athlete
Nov 08 2007 12:41 pm
written by Zia
Hi, I’m Zia and I would like to tell you a tragic story about a young girl named Allison Stokke. She is an 18 year old High schooler from California. A popular sports blogger in New York found a picture of her and posted it on his site, he said Allison was “hot”. Then other Dozens of bloggers picked up the same image and spread it. It finally got to Allison that all these people were talking about her and sending pictures about her, on her MySpace she got over 1,000 messages from random people. Her father finally got things to stop and deleted all the web sites about Allison Stokke.
This all happened just because Allison Stokke was not thinking very much and put her picture on the internet, open for anyone to see. Some times people don’t realize how dangerous the internet can be. Allison is actually very lucky, there has been worse cases with the internet. Something worse could have happened to Allison Stokke. There are crazy people in the world. She could have never survived.
Original article: e-School News Online
posted by Jac de Haan