It is time for us to get
down to work and make a Treasure Hunt in a guided and easy way.
Anybody with the only
ability to use the Internet browser can make a Treasure page on-line in this
section. THIS IS A NEW VERSION
of the generator.
We have to remark that there is a major improvement
regarding the way of saving the web page. To do that there is now one simple
procedure which works with all the browsers.
You can see now an
example of Treasure Huntmade with this generator:
First of all, you should
make a new folder in your hard disk where you will save the generated page and
where you will place the images you wish to include on your WebQuest page. The
images can have the JPG and the GIF formats. The latter can be
animated.
The Graphics Interchange
Format (GIF) is used for images with up to 256 colors; therefore, it
is suitable for icons and drawings. The GIF image has no loss when it
is compressed.
The Joint Photographics
Experts Group format (JPEG o JPG) is suitable for pictures with up to
16.7 million colors. The compression level can be chosen when saving
the file, knowing that a higher level of compression results in lower
image quality. For example, a BMP photograph with a file size of 1,400
Kb can be converted to a JPG image with a file size of 75 Kb.
In Windows O.S. you can make a new
folder by clicking My PC icon
and then selecting
File/New/Folder. You can name it My_Hunt, for instance.
A new folder will be created:
Then, click on the folder to select it,
choose File/Rename and name it My_Hunt, for example, or type the
name you like.
Only three stepsare
necessary to make a Treasure Hunt. These steps are explained in detail
bellow, but because of their simplicity, it could be more didactic if you had a
try first. You can read the instructions after having a look at the generator.
Type the data in the corresponding text fields and text
areas: Title of project, Author, Subject, Level, E-mail, Description, Keywords, Introduction, Questions, Resources, The Big Question, Evaluation,
and Credits.
All the text fields (except
Author, Subject, E-mail and Level) are optional, so those that are
left blank will not appear on the generated page.
Description:
It is a brief description of the generated web page. For example:
“Treasure Hunt
about whales for students of primary school”. This text improves the way search
engines list our page.
In
the Keywords field you can type several words or
expressions so that search engines can list your web page more
accurately. The words and expressions you use must be separated
using commas; for example: , whales, teaching, on-line
exercises. Therefore, when the users look up the word
Whales or the expression On-line exercises
in a search engine, they will get a great deal of entries and,
among them, they will probably find the URL of our Treasure Hunt page.
Font, text color
and background color can be selected by clicking on the
corresponding options.
This image shows how an user has selected,
by clicking on the corrresponding options,
Arial as a font, brown as text color and white as background
color.
If you want a color which is not
available in the list, you can type its code. In HTML language each color has
a code formed by numbers and letters.
Click here to see a list of some
of these codes.
If you want a font which
is not available in the list, you can type its name in the correspondig text
field. In the following drop down menu you can find a long list of the most
popular fonts:
You have to be aware that
a browser can only read the fonts that are installed in the user's computer.
Then, what happens when a font is not available in the user's computer? The page
appears with the browser's default font (generally, Times New Roman, Arial and
Courier New in Windows, and Times, Helvetica and Courier in MAC O. S. Therefore,
you should use those fonts that are more likely to be available in the visitor's
operating systems.
Font
size can also be selected from a drop down menu. By doing this,
you change the normal text size; the other font sizes (the
smaller one of the anchors and the big one of the title) will
appear in a size proportional to the one you have chosen.
A background image can be selected so
as to make the page more attractive and to increase the student's
motivation. The page you are reading, for instance, has a
background image.
In the same way as you
paint or paper a wall, you can "paint" a page with an image. A browser usually
makes a mosaic by repeating an image all over the background, so you
needn't use a large image. In fact, the smaller the image is, the faster the
downloading of the image will be in the browser. Speed is always a major concern,
since visitors of your page could leave it if it downloads very slowly. Not all
the images can be used as a background; for instance, a full detailed graphic of
the Star Wars spaceship can take over the screen or make the text on the page
illegible. The most effective background images are small and with textures, and
they can be repeated so as to form a full background, offering a pleasant
atmosphere at the back of the page.
To specify the background
image you wish to use, you have to type the image file name (for example:
texture.gif) in the Background image text field. That image must be
in the same folder as the generated web page.
You can insert images
in all the sections of the Treasur Hunt page; this is worth
explaining in detail. Since these images were placed in My_Hunt
folder, to insert the images you simply have to type their
file names with their extensions, and you can align
them to the left of the paragraph, in the center (above the
paragraph) or to the right of the paragraph.
Let's see an example of this:
We place the image named
fingers.gif in My_Hunt folder, and we type "fingers.gif" in the
Image text field. If it is aligned to the left, it will appear like
this:
If it is aligned in the center, it
will look like this:
If it is aligned to the right, it
will be like this:
Next to all the textareas, you can see this button:
, which is very
important to design the page properly. With this button you can
insert a line break. When you click the button once,
you insert a line break in your text, and when you click it
twice you can start another paragraph. An example:
Let us suppose that the
questions are:
Write down on your notebook the answers to the
following questions:
What architect built the Prado Museum?
In the reign of what king was it built?
When was the day of the inauguration? How many art
works were there then?
If you want this text to look like
this on the generated web page, you have to type as follows:
Write
down on your notebook the answers to the following questions:
Then you have to click
twice for a
new paragraph.
After that, you must type: "1. What architect built the Prado Museum?
before clicking
once.
After that, you must type: "2. In the reign of what king was it built?
once.
After that, you must type: "3. When was the day of the inauguration? How
many art works were there then?
once.
The generator page will
look like this:
Every time you
click the
button, we
introduce the necessary code language (<br>), but you can also do it
manually. The generated page will look like this:
Questions:
Write
down on your notebook the answers to the following questions:
What architect built the Prado Museum?
In the reign of what king was it built?
When was the day of the inauguration? How
many art works were there then?
In the "Resources"
section you can introduce up to 15 URLs by filling in the Description texts
fields and their corresponding URLs text fields.
We think that 15 URLs are enough in most
cases, but you can add more URLs. Let us suppose you want to include the
following link:
"Another important museums:
Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA). New York: http://www.moma.org
El Louvre: http://www.louvre.fr"
To do this you have to click the
Link button
in the "More links" section, and the following will appear:
You have to substitute the word "Description"
by "Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). New York", for instance, and the word "link" by
the corresponding URL: " www.moma.org".
In all the sections of your WebQuest you can find
the following buttons:
Bold.
When you click on it, this text appears: <b>bold</b>. You have to
replace the word bold with the text you want to be written in bold.
For instance, if you wish the word School to be written in bold, you must
type: <b>School</b>, and this word will look like this: School.
Italic.
When you click on it, the following text appears: <i>italic</i>. You
must type your text between both tags.
Generating the web page:;
Once you have made your project, you can select
one of the following options if you want to change the default printing
options:
Printing
options for the generated Treasure Hunt:
Treasure Hunt design for printing, without anchors and in full page.
Printing the text in the chosen color on a white background.
The printing default options are as
follows:
With anchors and a
clean design so that the page reads well on a screen.
The text will always be
printed in black on a white background.
There are two options to modify the default printing options:
e Treasure
Hunt design for printing, without
anchors and in full page.
Printing the text in
the chosen color on a white background. If you choose this option, the text
will be printed in the color you have chosen, and the background color will
always be white, as it is the default browser color. But if you choose a light
color text, it might be difficult to read.
Finally, you have to click the
MAKE TREASURE HUNT button, you will be able to see the
generated web page in the same browser window.
Don't worry if you can't
see the inserted images on your page. You will see them when you save the page
in your folder (My_Hunt), where the images are.
If you want to edit the generated page, click on the browser's Back button to return to this page and, after making the
changes, press the
MAKE TREASURE HUNT button again.
Saving the generated page:
Press the
MAKE TREASURE HUNT button to create the
Treasure hunt
in this window.
Save the page by selecting File/Save as..../Web
Page, HTML only
If you publish your Treasure
Hunt page on the Internet, please send us your page URL so as to be able
to link it from this page.
The generated web
page fulfils the requirements of the World Wide Web Consortium regarding the
HTML 4.01 language. The following logo can be included at the bottom of the
generated page: .
However, it is advisable to validate the page on the W3C web page:http://validator.w3.org/