We’ll continue working with WordPress today. By now, I hope you have all had a chance to look through some of the themes and find one that you can work with. If not, my advice is to choose something for now, and come back to the theme later.

You’ll spend most of the class session today working on your web portal. Please feel free to ask each other for help. I like to see students sharing course work with each other and collaborating to solve problems. I’ll also do my best to help anyone with a question as well.

I have been working on the sample web portal that I created during the last session, and I want to share a few tips based on what I’ve seen:

• If you’re new to building a web page, choose something simple.
• If you find something that is close to what you want, play around a little with the options.
• Use the Quick Edit option to make changes to the date, categories, or status.
• When you are editing pages or posts, pay attention to whether the editor is on Visual or Text.
• Before you click Save Draft or Publish, always highlight the Text version of what you have written and copy it. Things sometimes go wrong. You can paste it into a Google Doc or an email message. Backups are good.
• Use the toolbar to simplify the process of marking up your content. It’s how to add a link, change text to boldface, etc.
• Use the Add Media button if you want to include images or other resources.

In-Class Writing

We’ll do the in-class writing at the end of the session, in the last 15 minutes or so, following this process:

1. Go to the P1: Web Portal discussion in our Google+ Community.
2. Go to the “Share what’s new” box and click link. Add the link to your Web Portal.
3. Add a comment that tells us about what you have done so far and asks for feedback on something specific. Try to phrase your question so that it’s an open-ended question (that is, not one that would be answers with “yes” or “no”).
4. Once you post your web portal, go look at posts for 2 or 3 other people, and provide them some feedback on their work. If you notice that several people have already responded to someone’s post, please move on to one that hasn’t gotten feedback yet. The goal is for everyone in the class to get a response or two.
5. By 5 PM tomorrow (Friday, 1/31), send me an email if you have any questions or concerns about your project. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you’re on track. You only have to email me if you have questions or concerns.

Homework

Your web portals are due next class session, so your homework is to keep working on them. You will have time in class to make last-minute revisions, and we’ll go over and write the project reflection. I’ll also demonstrate how I want you to submit the work in Scholar.