Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Building an Online Crossword Puzzle

Today you will take the text file of your college-bound vocabulary that you have been carefully creating, and upload it to the online crossword puzzle generator:

  1. Open your web browser
  2. Go to the above website for the crossword puzzle generator
  3. Enter the title of your crossword puzzle: College-Bound Vocabulary
  4. Enter your Period # + first name + last initial [Example: "2 - Ms. Kline"]
  5. Change the color of the square to "grey"
  6. Upload your text file by clicking "Browse" and navigating to your vocab.txt file in your documents folder
  7. Click "Load Puzzle"
  8. Check your answers and clues and scroll down
  9. Click "Make Puzzle"
  10. Drag the link to your puzzle (the symbol to the left of the URL in the address bar of the web browser) to your desktop so you can find it online again
  11. Click "Solve Puzzle Online"
  12. Solve your puzzle
  13. Check your answers every time you answer a question: you will see GREEN where the answer is correct and RED where you still need to input an answer
  14. You must use the paper copy as a reference for your vocabulary words, NOT your .txt file
  15. Show Ms. Kline your GREEN crossword puzzle
  16. Go to "File" and drop down to Page Setup...
  17. Change the "Scale" to 50%
  18. Print your document: Be sure to enter "From 1 to 1"
  19. Bring your paper to Ms. Kline
Skills demonstrated with this project:
  1. How to correctly format a plain text file (.txt) for a computer program
  2. How to navigate to a file on your computer and upload it to a website
  3. How to make selections on a website to customize your final project
  4. How to edit a document online-checking for errors before printing
  5. How to refer to paper "copy" (words on paper) for editing purposes
  6. How to use a vocabulary word in a "kid-friendly English" sentence
  7. Understanding of the vocabulary by solving the puzzle.
Great job!!

Monday, February 27, 2012

Week 24

Welcome to Week 24 and the Second Semester of Keyboarding!

Are you ready for a busy week? Good!

We're getting back on the home keys, so to speak, and ready to continue our keyboarding online lessons. For the second semester, home keys are still the most important thing to focus on. Now, however, you will only complete the one minute or longer lines in each lesson. This will allow you to see your improvement in speed, but will require you to pay attention for a longer period of time, and watch out for errors.

Our special lesson this week is to learn how to upload the plain text file you have been creating for your weekly college-bound vocabulary lesson. If you have formatted your file correctly, the computer program will understand it, and it will turn this document into an online, live crossword puzzle. You will even be able to solve your puzzle online!

This week you will:
In your student agenda, please write down your Week 24 Learning Objective:
We will learn how to upload correctly formatted text for a computer program.

Ms. Kline's Week 24 Key Vocabulary: