User:Vtaylor/Willard/CIS 89A HTML and CSS/Summary 2
Summary 2. HTML Basics
Great work everyone. Although the course is moving very quickly because of the short semester, it if great to see that so many of you are really contributing to making this a terrific learning experience for everyone.
Learning to Learn - Learning Literacy is a DeAnza initiative to promote lifelong learning. You can learn anything, anytime anywhere if you have a few basic learning literacy skills. We introduce these skills and provide practice throughout this course in addition to the regular course content.
Your Responsibility - The key element of Learning to learn is taking responsibility for your own learning. Questions are good. However, some of you are asking good questions that you can find the answers to yourself right now. I am happy to talk about your questions and help you find ways to find the answers yourself. That's my job.
Grading - As you submit work through the module, it may be graded before the deadline if it satisfies the requirements for that activity as described in the Assignments for the module.
Working ahead - You can work ahead if you want to. Check back to discussions when modules are current to see what others are contributing as shared work is an important part of the course.
Discussion posts - How much is enough information to include in your discussion submissions? Usually a link to a resource (if required) and 3-4 sentences that provide some specific information about the discussion topic. The module Assignments description of the discussion activity outlines the specific requirements and may include prompt questions. These should not be a complete rewrite of all the information in the resource. Your comments should let others know enough for them to decide they want to learn more. Like a movie trailer.
Suggestions. - If you have an idea for how the course can be more interesting and relevant, please let me know. Your feedback and suggestions are appreciated. The course is always evolving so updates and enhances are included as they come up. This is great for you and this class. Students in future semesters benefit as well.
Questions - Please let me know if you have questions. It is usually faster to find answers for yourself. Practice using search and picking a few keywords to find something helpful. This is an important skill to develop. But don't get too frustrated. Try 2-3 searches with several keywords. Also, look at results on the second or third page of results. Look to see if there are other keywords that get better search results and try again with these keywords. If you are still having trouble finding an answer, I am happy to help.
Coding projects
You can use any text editor. You are not limited to using Glitch. The requirement is to submit your coding projects as their web address, preferably the view that a visitor sees.. The html and css files must be in a web-accessible directory on a network server. How you accomplish that is up to you. Glitch handles some of that process for you.
Each coding project should be a new project file so you focus on the requirements for the module elements and attributes. Most of the requirements should be visible on the page display. That way, we know that you are using the tags correctly in your code.
head title tag - The title tag text appears at the top of the frame around the display window. It is also used in the page summary displayed by search engines. Glitch provides a default. Change the text to represent your project.
Comments in html and css - Comments are documentation. As you build larger sites, it is important to included notes about your work. You are making a lot of decisions as you write your code that guide your choices. Include the information as comments. This information will be a big help to you or someone else who has to make changes to the code in the future.
Cascading styles - The browser uses the style that is closest to the content. If there are style definitions for the paragraph (p) tag in the css file and in a style tag in the html head and in the p tag in the html body, the browser "cascades" through these and would display the paragraph using the style in the p tag - closest to the content to be displayed. This provides a lot of flexibility. It can save a lot of coding and changing is styling is shared throughout the site.
Coming up... Module 3. Text
A few words - Text - Most web pages include a lot of text. It is important to know how to format text for readability and searching. Most visitors skim to find the information they are looking for. So it is important that pages of text are attractive and well organized.
