Library Defenders: December 2017

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Keep Learners on Task with Focused Browsing

Hapara has recently rolled out great updates designed to “refocus learners on the task at hand.” Their updated include Open Tabs, Focused Browsing, Scheduled Browsing, and Viewing Browsing in Progress.

This blog post will focus on Focused Browsing. See what I did there?

Focused browsing allows teachers to focus their students on a specific site for a specific amount of time. While focused browsing is active, students cannot open new tabs, go to a different tab, or browse new/other URLs. This helps them stay on task without getting distracted.

This is ideal for online assessments. If you give quizzes, tests, or other timed exercises online, now you can eliminate the worry of cheating and plagiarism simply with focused browsing. If you’ve thought about online assessments but weren’t sure how to overcome the worry, focused browsing is the way to go.

There are several options for customization in focused browsing:

Allow students to go anywhere within a particular site or limit them to only select pages
Time limits up to 3 hours
What happens at the end of the session, whether you close the pages or keep them open

If you're intrigued by focused browsing, give it a try in class! And then click here to see the rest of Hapara’s new updates.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

WR's Hour of Code

This week is National Computer Science Week. As part of this, Code.org hosts the Hour of Code, where they encourage everyone to learn a little bit of code.

So, with that in mind, I thought we could celebrate #throwbackthursday a little early and throw all the way back to 1999, when I took a high school coding class at Bishop Neumann High School. In the class, we learned msdos and html (those were simpler times). Html has evolved and become more complex, with xhtml and html5...blah blah blah.

Anyway, basic HTML is not that complicated. You just need to start the code by using the <> blocks and then tell it to end by using </> blocks. For example, <html> begins the block and </html> ends the block.

Then there are basic other commands, such as:

<head> and </head> create a header

<body> and </body> (Everything you want to appear on the page must be between these blocks.)

<br> which inserts a line break

<p> which inserts a paragraph (or two line) break

<a href=””> and </a>which inserts a link

<center> and </center> which places the text in the center

<hr> puts a horizontal line across the page

<body bgcolor=””> changes the background color of the page

<body text=””> changes the text color of the page

You can also use hex values to determine a color, which is identifying colors by a combination of six digits. Here are some hex values.

There are many other commands and you can find some of them here.

So for example, if I wanted something to look like this:

Welcome to Warrior Run Hour of Code!

Are you learning about the basics of html today?

Visit the blog for more information.

The code would look like this.

You can use a site like practiceboard to write code and check the output of the code.

I also recommend the following sites to learn more about coding in general, including HTML.

So here’s the fun part. Below is a small amount of text and I want you to use the code and the practiceboard website to type out the code. If you email me the code and it is correct, you will be entered into a drawing for a $10 gift card to Dunkin Donuts. Everyone knows that teachers run on Dunkin. :)

Try this:

I learned how to code with HTML!

Please enter me into the drawing for the Dunkin’ gift card. Thanks!

---

That’s it! The due date is December 15, 2017. Email me the link to your practiceboard. Good luck!