• MS: Professional Technical Communications

• Teaching, Learning & Technology

• Serendipity35 (EdTech blog)

Lunch Learning Session at NJIT
Creating Web Pages Without Knowing How to Create Web Pages
A look at online services, particularly Protopage, which allows you to create and host web pages for free and without knowing HTML or any software package.  This page is a Protopage, so go ahead and move around the text boxes - resize things - play in the sandbox. The page will be back to my settings when you refresh or the next surfer comes by.

POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS:

• On-the-fly web pages for classes
• Web pages that can be edited by a group for projects & collaboration
• Personal, class, club home pages.
  

To see the presentation notes and links referred to in the session, click the "Protopage Presentation" tab.

• PROTOPAGE

• Writeboard

• Tools from 37signals

• Writely

• My Space

• Facebook

• Blogger

Using Protopage:   Why use it?

• It's free
• Your choice of backgrounds, designs, layout etc. on an active page (some are supplied, but you may use your own)
• Accepts news feeds (BBC, CNN, Reuters, New York Times, London Times, CNET, ESPN ...)
• Use of color-coded “sticky notes” for text
• Easy to use bookmarks frame for links of webpage URLs
• Name the site’s URL as you wish         www.protopage.com/teachnology/  
• Share pages within your site with the public or keep them private
• Use it as your own browser 'start page' (in the way of My Yahoo etc.)
• While no browser plug-in is required for Ajax, it requires users to have JavaScript enabled in their browsers. This applies to all browsers that support Ajax.

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FOR TECHIES - some background on Ajax and what's behind Protopage  

 

Protopage utilizes Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, generally referred as Ajax, a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of XHTML (or HTML) and CSS for marking up and styling information. (XML is commonly used, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML).

 

The Document Object Model manipulated through JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.

The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server.
In some Ajax frameworks and in some situations, an IFrame object is used instead
of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the web server.

 

Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that
refers to the use of a group of technologies together. In fact, derivative/composite technologies based substantially upon Ajax, such as AFLAX, are already appearing.

 

Want to know more about Ajax?   see   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29

 

This Protopage site is on teaching and learning using technology. Though it contains information and links on those topics, it is also used in workshops & courses to demonstrate technologies that allow for rapid web page creation and collaboration without knowing much (if any) HTML, coding or programming.

TEACHNOLOGY    

I like the term "teachnology" enough that I would buy the domain and trademark it - except that others thought of it before me.
There's the portal  http://www.teach-nology.com/  and, according the UMass Amherst website, "TEACHnology® is a registered trademark of  Center For Teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst ."
So, thank you Google, for preventing me from using it "officially" and getting sued!