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.

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.