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Tips: Page
1 Page 2
Page
3 Incentives
for Students
Disclaimers
Fundraising
with Homework Hero
Posting an E-mail Address?
Simple
Text Effects with HTML Tags
Hyperlinks
Marquee Tags
An Image in a Marquee
Organized Teacher Lists
Emergency E-mail
Access More
Tips ... Incentives
for Students Many teachers encourage the use of Homework Hero by giving rewards,
usually several points of extra credit, for using it. Some teachers give students credit for locating information posted on
the assignment page. Others post questions or puzzles, and give extra credit
for solutions to them. Still others give credit for a print out
of the Homework Hero page with a parent signature. All of these are
especially good as start-up strategies to encourage students and
parents to look at the Homework site. Disclaimers Homework Hero is a great thing, but the Internet is still imperfect.
So, it's a good idea to issue a disclaimer on your assignment page!
"Students are responsible for completing all homework assignments given
in class. If an assignment is not listed on this page, or if you are unable to
access this page for any reason, your homework is still due on schedule." Fundraising
with Homework Hero Remember that Homework Hero can be used for fundraising.
You can recruit local sponsors for your Homework Hero Web pages --- fees
are shared between Homework Hero and your school's fundraising unit. For
more details see:
http://www.homeworkhero.com/hh/sponsors.htm
Why not use funds generated by to offer prizes to teachers for regular posting?
Some schools already successfully encourage use of Homework Hero in this way.
Posting an E-mail Address?
As you know, Homework Hero permits teachers to post an e-mail address on
the assignment page. This is a great benefit to parents and teachers. However, some
teachers may worry that posting an e-mail address publicly will generate
large volumes of unsolicited e-mail. This is possible,
although harvesting e-mail addresses is somewhat more
difficult with Homework Hero than with most web sites. This is because
your page is dynamically generated from a database when your page is called; i.e.,
your page only "exists" when someone explicitly calls it from a Homework Hero link.
(On the other hand, some search engines now store cached
pages with your page stored in a conventional format --
so you are not completely protected.) As
an experiment, I posted a new e-mail address to a
homework hero assignment page. This page has not
attracted a single piece of spam in the 4 months that it
has been posted. What
should you do? I think the smartest thing to do is to
get a second free "public" e-mail address
(from yahoo or hotmail, for example) to post on an
assignment page. Should spam become a severe problem,
you can always change that address. Simple
Text Effects with HTML Tags You can use HTML commands in Homework Hero forms to change the
appearance of text on your assignment page:
Example 1. To make text bold, enter:
<b>This text is bold.</b>
Example 2. To add color, enter:
<font color=red>This text is red.</font>
Example 3. To produce text that is bold and red and in the
Times New Roman font, enter:
<b><font color=red face=Times New Roman>This text is bold, red, Times New Roman</font></b> Note:
Quotation marks are often used in HTML, but are usually
optional. In Homework Hero version 1.0, use of quotation
marks can produce errors when used in HTML tags place in
the Course title and Announcement headline fields. So I
suggest avoiding quotation marks. This glitch has been
corrected in Homework Hero 2.0. Hyperlinks Many teachers find it useful to place hyperlinks to favorite
web sites on their homework hero assignment page. This can
be done by entering an appropriate HTML tag, as in the example
below
<a href="http://www.yourpage.htm">Page Title</a>
For your own links, replace the text inside of the quotes
with the URL for the page you wish to link to (copied from
the address bar in Internet Explorer) and replace the words
"Page Title" with the name you give to the page you are linking to.
For more hints on HTML with Homework Hero, visit this help page:
http://www.homeworkhero.com/help/teacher_help.htm and look under "Custom HTML".
Marquee
Tags Add emphasis to headlines with the marquee tag in
html! To see an example, go to Mr. Forman's page: http://www.homeworkhero.com/cgi-bin/display.cgi?meany+ak_lhcs How do you produce an effect like this?
<MARQUEE BGCOLOR="white">This is my marquee
text</MARQUEE>
Use tags to change font and color inside the marquee
text. As always, remember Fridays (or Mondays) are a good time to
update your assignment page! An Image in a Marquee
Many Homework Hero Users post images, and many use the marquee
tag to produce scrolling text. Did you know that you can combine the two
to have an image scroll across your page?
Mr. Gregory of Our Lady of Victory School provides a nice example.
You can see his page here:
http://www.homeworkhero.com/cgi-bin/display.cgi?WGregory+ga_olv
To produce this effect, insert this code into the Announcement text field
when you update assignments:
<MARQUEE BGCOLOR="white">
<img src="http://www.homeworkhero.com/images/library/beachball.gif">
</MARQUEE>
To get a slightly different effect (with an image bouncing back and forth) try this:
<MARQUEE BGCOLOR="white" BEHAVIOR="alternate" SCROLLAMOUNT="005">
<img src="http://www.homeworkhero.com/images/library/beachball.gif">
</MARQUEE>
Organized Teacher Lists
The list of teacher assignment pages on Homework Hero is normally
ordered alphabetically by last name.
When a school creates special pages for clubs, teams, and other organizations
and activities, managers can create a nice arrangement by carefully filling in
"last names." For example, for all club pages, enter a last name that begins with
the letters "AA" in order to have the club pages appear first on the assignment page
list.
To see a nice example, visit Bishop Eustace High School's list of pages: http://www.homeworkhero.com/cgi-bin/aahero01/acceptit20/search.cgi?dir=nj_beps On this page, You might also notice the color coding of titles, which is done by including
html tags for font colors within the page title field. But please be careful using
HTML in title fields --- if you are not careful you can create some odd effects that show
up throughout the teacher list. Emergency
E-mail Access If you ever need to check your e-mail from a computer other than your own,
remember this web site:
http://www.mailstart.com Just enter your address and password in the input boxes, and your mail will
be displayed on a web page! (Works for conventional POP3 accounts). No
sign-up forms or software required, but you can only use
it once in a week for free.
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