Destination: The Uses of an Instructor Home Page

Foundation Developing your own web site with access to learning materials you create and select can be an important tool for your teaching. Creating your own website means you acknowledge that learning happens beyond the four walls of a classroom and the pages of a textbook. It means you are reaching out to the online world that so many of our students traverse within.

• Your current syllabi
• Information about how and when to contact you
• Resource links
  • materials you create (what you might give as handouts in class)
  • materials created by others (what other teachers might give as handouts or pages created by Online Writing Labs)
  • links to particular web sites related to learning topics (for instance, you may be reading Dante and you could refer students to this excellent site from UT-Austin)
  • links to your own scholarship or the scholarship of others
• Links to online platforms for communicating (whether it is to a Bulletin Board or a full course platform like WebCT)

Having your own home page expands your possibilities for teaching. The web is now essentially a tremendous library of information--and many excellent sites exist. It is also an easy means of distributing text and communicating. In a literature class, you could incorporate a reading that may not be in the anthology. Then, you could have them post responses to the reading in a bulletin board. In a composition class, you might assign additional materials on some writing skill beyond the handbook--you might even be able to assign some interactive exercises. For research projects, you can point students to additional readings. The possibilities could go on.

I recommend that you make work using the web required--not optional. Consider the internet to be another textbook for the class--accessing it is required.

Practice

Getting your own folder in the web server

The first step in publishing your own web pages and creating your own academic web site is to acquire your own folder on the web server--this is your web-place to put your web-files. The process is very simple:

1. Look at the ACCD Web Publishing Policy and Procedures Page (http://www.accd.edu/is2/publishing/). Read the official word from the District, and print a copy of the Web Page Owner Agreement form.
2. Take this form to Paul McQuien and he will help you fill it out and send it to the ACCD Information Technology department. Paul is the person who actually creates your folder on the web server.
3. The ACCD IT department will process your form within a week and send you access information to you own web folder.

Creating HTML files

These days, if you can create a word processing document, you can create a web page. Both Microsoft Word and Word Perfect have simple commands for saving a document into HTML. For those starting out creating web pages, I recommend these word processing tools because they are so easy to use. (See Instructions for Creating a Web Page Using Microsoft Word.)

For more advanced web page creation, you will want to use a HTML editor. I recommend Dreamweaver, but if you want a free program to use you can use Netscape or Mozilla Composer that comes with these browsers for free. Even these web editing programs are simple to use and provide you with essentially WYSIWYG composition--no knowledge of HTML required (though a little bit helps).

Posting your work to the web

To get your materials "on the web," you need to copy files from your computer to your web folder. It's that simple. If the file exists on the web folder and it is an HTML file, it is viewable on the web. Two ways exist to upload files to the web server:

Way #1: File Transfer (FTP)
Dr. Wolf and Maria Garcia prefer FTP because you avoid the possibility of inadvertently deleting material on your web folder. Many FTP clients exist, and you may want to invest in one like CuteFTP (made locally in San Antonio), but you can also use WS_FTP. The older free version available for academic use from Ipswitch can be downloaded here.

When you open WS_FTP to transfer files, here is the important information you will need to fill in:
Profile Name: Designate any name you choose
Host Name/Address: www.accd.edu
Host Type: Automatic detect
User ID: accd/yourusername------Example: accd/Lirvin
Password: yourpassword

When WS_FTP opens, you will see the left side opens files in your computer and the right side opens network folders. You will need to navigate on each side to the appropriate folders. Once you have the appropriate folders open, you transfer a file from one side to the other.

Way #2: Map a network drive
With this method, you create a direct connection to your web folder so that the web folder shows as a folder on the desktop of your office computer. When you wish to "upload" to the web folder, you simply "save as" the file into this folder that exists on your desktop. When you wish to edit a page, you can do a FILE and OPEN directly from the folder. It is the simplest and easiest method. You probably will need some help in making this direct connection to your web folder, so ask Elida or me to help you. See Placing a Homepage from a Faculty Workstation.

See a Screenshot Guide for Updating Your Homepages for better instructions for this process.