Tuesday, February 9, 2010

My Fourth IS Lesson......

Time flies. I had already attended the fourth IS lesson last week. As usual, Mr Cheong gave us a lot of homework. He also told us an extremely horrid news- we are having IS test next week, which is on the 10th of February. I was startled and waves of pressure swept my little mind. I have not comprehended what Mr Cheong taught about HTML and examination is approaching. I think I am going to fail my exam. I do not think that I am able to get A1 for IS (Infocomm Studies). I have to pull up my socks in order to pass the test with flying colours.

Mr Cheong showed us the answers for the assignment he gave us a week ago. All the answers are in his website ( http://webnewmedia.ning.com ). He asked us to browse his website and check our answers ourselves, much to the delight of those who did not do. Mr Cheong also distributed a piece of paper to us. It was about how to submit the HTML Challenge file "news.html" to him. The procedure was written down on the piece of paper.

On that day, he taught us a new topic. It was about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS defines how HTML elements are displayed. There are altogether three ways to use CSS. They are the Internal Style Sheet, Inline Styles and External Style Sheet but focus mainly on External Style Sheet only for this week. The styles of External Style Sheet are usually saved in external.css files . It can change the appearances, layouts of multiple pages at once and together which is very useful. Let me list an example. It is like when we change one of the pages, the other pages will be changed automatically and quickly. In the past, when CSS was not invented, people had to actually go to every page and change them one by one which was a great waste of time. But today, it is much more convenience, we merely have to change one of the pages. The Cascading Style Sheet document is always located in the same file as HTML file so we can find the CSS file very easily if we know where the HTML file is.

Every page is linked to .css file by using the link tag. A HTML without styles is different from a HTML with styles. There will be an extra line which shows the styles and the link ( I hope I am correct). Mr Cheong also showed us some websites for us to learn CSS and recommended a movie in Youtube called Introduction to CSS. If you want to know more, please visit my teacher's blog. I get some details from there which is very useful to me.

Monday, February 1, 2010

The Third IS Lesson

Computer lessons were always fun during primary schooldays, but not in secondary school. Now, we have to do a lot of homework for IS. Last week, I forgot to put my photo in my IS blog. Luckly, I managed to put it on the eleventh hour. Phew! Last Wednesday, Mr Cheong taught us something new, something I did not know about (I am very bad in computer skills). Besides, he also gave us more homework (hope Mr Cheong will not be angry when he sees it, sorry). What he introduced us was about HTML and worksheet HTML. He showed us the backbone behind a website. I was pretty startled when I saw it. It was very complicated that made my head spin. He also taught us how to create web pages using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

The objectives of the introduction to HTML are as below:
1) To comprehend HTML coding and tags.
2) To know how to add text, images, link to a web page.
3) To build upon students' web knowledge and greater appreciation of how a HTML page is presented on the Internet and the codes that are involved to display the various page elements.
4) To create a functional website (at least 3 pages) using basic HTML and CSS.
5) To be able to embed external media (i.e.images, web 2.0 technologies) into the website.

HTML tags has 3 parts: start tag, content and end tag but some do not have end tag as they have no content. HTML is very complex and it takes a lot of time to learn. So, learning HTML is very difficult. Mr Cheong just explained to us briefly because time was running out and I could not comprehend at all. Mr Cheong told us to watch a movie in Youtube titled "Learn HTML in 10 minutes" because almost everything he wanted to teach is in the movie and it will definitely benefit us. It is also considered very short as HTML takes hours to teach.

It is something like that. If we want to save in HTML format, the file name is either xxx.html or xxx.htm. The homework he gave us was an assignment again. We were allowed to accomplish it in pair. My knowledge about computer is very little so I find the assignment very difficult. My partner is Arthur and I will definitely affect his speed when he is doing the work as I will ask a lot of questions.

I have only scratched the surface of HTML and may be wrong. If I am wrong, please comment nicely.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

My second IS lesson.

My class was slightly late for IS lesson today. Mr Cheong hoped we will not be late next time. Today, he repeated what he had taught last week such as what is FTP,URL etc. We were told that blog, Twitter and Facebook are web 2.0 which are the latest. We were then asked to decorate our blog by changing blogskin and give our blog address to him. He also told us to post our photos because marks will be given. Those who did not post their photos (includes me) were nervous when they heard that horrid news. We quickly asked Mr Cheong to teach us the ways to transfer photos into computers.He explained to us. There are several ways to transfer images. We can scan an image into the computer, use a digital camera and transfer it to the computer or send it through Bluetooth. After that, Mr Cheong wanted everyone of us to participate in a forum. There are more work to do now. The forum discussions are on social media, IP and blog/website. He wants to hear more of our personal thoughts on the web & new media- 1) the social impact of new media technologies, 2) ethical issues on media usage and intellectual property and 3) blog/web differences.

The objectives of the forum discussions are as below:

1) Explain social networking websites, its uses and social impacts.
2) Explain intellectual property and observing copyright protection.
3) Decide blog or website- which is the best?

Five marks are given for this assessment. The forum topic that we have to choose from is based on the class index number as stated:

1) Index 1-11: Social impact of new media.
2) Index 12-22: Intellectual Property- Is copy right?
3) Index 23-33: Decide blog or website.

There are some videos for us to see about the discussions. My index number is between index 12-22, so I am supposed to do "Intellectual Property-Is copy right?". I have to post a reply of more than 100 words and read 1 other posting by my friend in the same forum and write a feedback of about 50 words to them. Then, I will also have to read 1 other posting by my peer in another forum and give a feedback of about 50 words too.

If you want to know more, please visit Mr Cheong's blog.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

My first IS lesson!

Hi everybody, I am Leon. Pls look at "about me" to know more about me. On the 13th of January, Wednesday, I sat for my first IS lesson. The first lesson was conducted by Mr Kent Cheong who will be my IS teacher for the rest of the year. He is not a fierce teacher and his lesson was pretty interesting. If you want to know more about him, please go to http://webnewmedia.ning.com to browse his blog.

During his first lesson, he taught us some things related to Internet. I am a person who sucks in computer but i still managed to understand most of them. He let us see a movie in Youtube. If you want to see the movie, you can key in "Did you know?" in Youtube. It was a fascinating video. I was startled as i learned many new things and facts which I could hardly believe at all. It said that China will soon become the first English speaking country in the world. The 25% of India's population with the highest IQ's is greater than the total population of United States. The first commercial message was sent in December 1992 which was quite stunning to me. The amount of new information is doubling every two years. By 2013, a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain.

Mr Kent also showed us a 57-pages-presentation about the internet and world wide web. The Internet was originated to allow scientists at different places to share informatio. Internet became functional in Septenber 1969. Since then, Internet has grown in an extraodinary speed, from four host nodes in 1969 to more than 200 million host nodes today.

There are many Web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Safari and Mozilla. There are nine basic types of Web sites, they are portal , news, informational, business/marketing, educational, entertainment, advocacy, blog and personal. The slideshow also explained every web site. during the presentation,I managed to jot down some abbreviated word such as below:
1. URL= Uniform Resource Locator
2. FTP= File Transfer Protocol
3. VR= Virtual Reality
4. ISP= Internet Service Provider
5. WWW= World Wide Web
6. IM= Instant Messaging

For more information, please visit Mr Kent's blog, I get some of the information from there.