SchoolCMS User Guide
SchoolCMS is the combined web hosting, creating and editing service Windsor Locks Public Schools (WLPS) has contracted to provide district, school, and teacher website support. You may read how great it all is at http://www.schoolcms.net/ While there exists a rudimentary user guide on the CMS site, it is well, rudimentary. This document was written to provide Windsor Locks High School (WLHS) teachers a guide to building their own pages. Hands on guided training can also be scheduled by following the procedure below: Email Gerard
Table of contents
SchoolCMS User Guide ...................................................................................................... 1 Table of contents ............................................................................................................. 1 Getting started ................................................................................................................. 1 Website structure ............................................................................................................ 1 Main CMS Tools page .................................................................................................... 2 HTML editing ................................................................................................................. 3 Tables .............................................................................................................................. 5 Home Page Editing ......................................................................................................... 6 Editing Class pages ......................................................................................................... 7 Editing Lesson Pages ...................................................................................................... 8 Selecting Lesson pages ................................................................................................... 9 Uploading ........................................................................................................................ 9 Tricks and tips ............................................................................................................... 10 Beyond School CMS..................................................................................................... 11
Getting started
First read the SchoolCMS provided document. Go ahead, I 'll wait. (Good) The best way to learn about SchoolCMS is to try it. Contact me (Gerard) when you’re ready to get started and we’ll get your page activated. One drawback to SchoolCMS is once the editing feature has been turned on, your home page becomes “live” and shows up in the high school directory. Fortunately, all other pages can be made active (visible) or inactive (not visible to the public) at will. In addition, the home page is the only required feature – you can use or not use the other features as you wish.
Website structure
It might be helpful to understand the structure provided by SchoolCMS for you. One home page, to which may be added: One or more announcements
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Links to one or more class pages Links to one or more documents Embedding one or more images For each class page, you may add Links to one or more “Online Activities & Assignments” (lesson pages) Links to one or more “Handouts” (documents) Links to one or more external websites, with a brief description Embedding one or more images For each lesson page, you may add Links to one or more “Handouts” (documents) Links to one or more external websites Embedding one or more images Storage for files Storage for images On each page you can add standard Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) elements.
Main CMS Tools page
The main CMS Tools page looks like this.
Edit Preview w
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HTML editing
Each HTML page editor has a graphic toolbar that looks like:
Each distinct symbol is a button. You can press it to do something (unless it's grayed out). What’s really cool is you don’t have to remember any of this stuff. If you put your mouse cursor over something for a second, a pop-up will tell you what it is. For example, the first symbol is for making text Bold
The (Ctrl+B) indicates a keyboard shortcut. That is, instead of clicking on the B, you can hold the Ctrl key down while pressing b to make text bold. If bold is already selected, there’s a faint square outline around it. Clicking or pressing the Ctrl-B combination will turn off bolding. Example: Bold is off Bold is on Here’s a list of what the buttons do. Make text bold Make text italics Underline text Left justify text Center text Right justify text Fully justify text Select font and font size (click on options) Cut Copy Paste Paste as Text (removes formatting) Paste from Word (includes formatting) to get list of
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Find Find and Replace Make bullet list Make numbered list Undo an indent (move text back to the left, or “Outdent”) Indent Undo last operations (“oops”) Redo what you just undid Insert a hyperlink. (Image is “links” in a chain.) Clicking this opens a popup. A hyperlink is one of the things you click on a web page to jump to another spot. Remove a hyperlink. Insert an image. See Uploading, below "Cleanup messy code" I haven't actually figured this one out yet. Show the raw HTML code. Insert the current date. Unfortunately, this is the date you do the insert, not when the page is saved or edited. Insert the current time. This is the time of your insertion. (No, I don't know why you'd use this.) Set the foreground color. A box full of colors pops up in a separate window → Click on the one you want. (The #0033cc is the red-blue-green {RBG} code as a hexidemical number, or, in normal English: don't worry about it.) Set the background color. Here's an example of colored text: Remove formatting Subscript Superscript Insert special symbol (pop-up box gives choices) Insert one of those annoying smiley face things ("Emotions") Insert horizontal rule (line across page)
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Tables
An HTML table consists of one or more rows with one or more cells in them. The first row of a table is often a heading row, which sets column titles. Other rows are called body rows. Insert a table; a popup to set the number of rows and columns, et. al. appears Set table row properties (popup) Use to set a row as heading or body. Set cell properties (popup) Insert a row above selected row Insert a row below selected row Delete a row Insert column before selected column Insert column after selected column Delete a row Split two cells back apart Join cell to span multiple columns or rows
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Home Page Editing
The home page editing screen looks like this.
The example above produces:
image uraider100h.jpg
Announcements scroll here
Not set from home page edit; set from CMS Tools page
Set from CMS Tools page The class pages which appear are set by activating them in the class page editor. The title, "Class Pages", in the example is set by clicking on "Change Header" on the CMS Tools page
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Editing Class pages
The top page of the class page editor looks like this. Everything pretty much does what you expect.
The bottom part is shown to the right. You make handouts available by first uploading to your file storage place.
The example settings produce a page which looks like the image to the right, except the real thing is 25% larger.
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Editing Lesson Pages
The top of the the Lesson page editor looks like this. The "Standard(s)" and "lesson complete" fields only affect listings in the lesson selection page.
No graphic
and the bottom part of the page looks like:
Which produces:
No graphic
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Selecting Lesson pages
Click here on the CMS Tools page
to get this:
Note this is where the "Standard(s)" and "lesson complete" fields on the lesson edit page show up; they don't affect what shows up on the website.
Uploading
To upload files (or delete ones you've uploading already), click here on the CMS Tools page
You'll get: Click on one of these
Note the space usage and limitations. 25MB is 25,000,000 bytes so you have lots of room for text, a fair amount for documents like Word or Excel and small graphics, and probably not enough for video clips and the like. The storage summary is a wee bit confusing cause it mixes MB and KB on the same page. A KB is 1/1000th of a MB. Click on "files" to upload a file; it will then appear in all those Handout dropdown lists you saw before. Clicking on pictures gives you the place to upload graphics to show up in the banner and graphics dropdown lists
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After you select, for examples, "files," you get:
Click on browse and you can select one file on your PC to upload. "Rename" and "Delete" do what you expect.
Tricks and tips
Arranging classes on Home Page. Lessons show up alphabetically on the home page. You can set them the way you like by adding an HTML comment to the front of the title, like this:
The doesn't show up on the page but is used by the CMS webserver to order the pages. Posting Word documents. Word has the ability to convert its documents into HTML files. However, it generates multiple files and relies on creating directories to do. It isn't worth the effort to convert these into a School CMS friendly format: I'd suggest just uploading the Word documents as Word documents. Don't open links in new browser windows. When you go to add a link, there's a checkbox to specify opening the link in a new window.
Don't check it. As web usability researcher Jakob Nielsen says, "Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer's carpet. Don't pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks."1 (Note a user who wants the link to open in a new window can hold down the SHIFT key while clicking the link.)
1
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html
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Beyond School CMS
It's possible to go beyond what SchoolCMS provides and write your own HTML pages. It's probably not worth the effort, unless you already know HTML. HTML is reasonably straightforward and only takes time and effort to learn. But since you're a teacher, you don't have much of the former and the latter would be much better spent on helping me figure out how to raise MATH CAPT scores. If you decide to go that route, the best resource is http://www.w3schools.com/ . It has online tutorials and try it for yourself web pages. The best resource for what to do and what not to do for making your web pages user friendly is http://www.useit.com/ .
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