Hints & How To page

Most discussion groups, not just YG, are set up to reply to the whole group. It makes sense, because if it was hard to reply, it would deter people from doing so. However that's one reason you have to be careful.

If you want to reply to just the person who sent the mail, you need to copy their email address from the From line of the discussion group message, then open a new message and paste it in the To line.

During the process of creating a YG, you are asked
whether you want members to reply to all or reply only to the sender as default.

Below are the YG instructions on this topic:

Reply to All
When a member replies to a message, that reply can be sent to all the group members. This is the most convenient method for group communication. If you think your group members will want their replies to automatically go to the entire group, select the "reply to all" option. This will set the default action, but members can still change the "reply to" address on individual messages.

Reply to Sender
When a member replies to a message, that reply can be sent to only to the person who sent the original message. If your group's topic is sensitive, and you think members may want to reply to each other privately, select the "reply to sender" option. This will set the default action, but members can still change the "reply to" address on individual messages."

-- Go to Messages. When you read one that you want to keep, save it to your Desktop.
-- Return to Files, open your folder and click Add file and then the Browse button
-- Select Desktop (in the new window), then the message you want to save, and finally click Open
-- Click the Upload File button to copy the message to the folder that you created in the Files area.

This works in Internet Explorer and Safari.

You can also use the Search feature. Write a word from the Subject line, a Yahoo ID or the name of the person who wrote a message, and you will get all the messages related to what you wrote

Here’s what you can do if your browser is Internet Explorer:
1. Click on Tools on the top bar and then select Internet Options
2. The page opens with the General tab visible. At the bottom of the page, on the left hand side, you will see a clickable box that says Colors. Click on that.
3. On the right hand side of the Colors window you will see Links, with a color box for Unvisited and Visited. Click on the colors and choose two contrasting colors that you prefer

For Mozilla Firefox, under Tools choose Options. Under Fonts & Colors select Unvisited and Visited.
Similarly, Netscape has Edit > Preferences with color
choices near the top of the menu on the opening branch.

In the Yahoo Groups distribution or mail list, you post a message and it is sent to all the members of
the group. The messages are kept in numerical order and you can search by number or any word. You might also be able to get the messages related to a topic if the subject in each message has similar wording.

-- Click on Database (menu on the left)
-- Click on the link to the entry (e.g. "Tour of Tapped In")
-- Click on Add Record (top left)
-- Add the required information
-- Click on Save Record

To add a link to a Web page to be shared with other participants:
-- Go to the YG Homepage
-- Click Links (menu on the left)
-- Click on the folder where you want to post
-- Click Add a Bookmark (top left tab)
-- Fill in the information.
-- Click Save
If you have a series of links that do not fit anywhere, create a new folder, give it a name or category, and add the bookmarks inside.

You do not need to know about codes or html to change colors. When you are a moderator, you can select from
different sets of colors or use the customizing features to select your own colors: click next to the colors you want
for each part of the platform.
Here's how:
-- Click Management (navigation bar on the left - only visible when you are the owner or moderator of a group)
-- Click Description and Appearance (right column, on the top)
-- Scroll down the page to Colors and Photo
-- Click Edit next to "Colors"
And you will find what you are looking for.

Here are detailed instructions:
-- Go to the our Participants page, where you'll find Yahoo IDs, and choose a few people you'd like to add
-- Go to YM and click Add Contact (smilie with + sign on top)
-- Insert the Yahoo! ID
-- Click Next
-- Choose a name for your group (top left: baw06 ??)
-- Write a very simple intro message (I'd avoid referring names of those addressed or you'll have to change them every time!)
-- Click Next
-- The "Add More Details" feature is optional
-- Click Next
-- Introduce the next ID and follow the same procedure (you don't need to repeat the intro message, because it's the same as the previous one)
-- Click Finish when you're done.

Everything will be automatically saved: instant messages, chat logs, group chats (conferences) and alerts.

To retrieve the chatlogs:

-Go to the Contact menu in YM
-Select Messsage Archive and you will get all your IM and conferences chatlogs

You can follow more or less the same procedure to create your avatar.

This is Dafne's experience:
"You can have your students do group work during class time or off-class. In my English for architecture class, I have a 2-hour f2f class, and a 2-hour internet-based class, for the latter the students can meet at a computer room that I book for those students who do not have access to computers, but nobody is forced to be there, they can contact the group from any place. They also have a whole week (until next class) to complete the activities for that class. If we are using the Internet, we need to be consistent with the flexibility it offers. 
So, what I do is that I open a YM conference and invite all the students who are online, this is the whole group conference, where they can ask questions or make comments during the class. Then, one person in each group opens a new conference and invites the other members and me. In this way, I can go from group to group helping, if needed, just as I go from group to group in a f2f class, but with the added advantage of having the transcript of the whole group work process, which you cannot follow in a f2f class, unless you record each group separately.

Of course, for this to work, you need to design a collaborative group task (jig-saw activities are great for this) which is meaningful and interesting for the students to be engaged in their work.

The first time I used YM for group work, I was in Spain and the students in Caracas with their f2f teacher or at any other place."

In another posts, she adds:
"In YM you can have up to 5 different conference windows (a conference is for more than 2 people: Contacts > Invite to conference). I divide my class in groups (let's say for 20 students, 4 groups of 5). Then I ask one person in each group to open a new conference, invite the other members and me, so I can follow their work. After the session, each group uploads the chatlog to the platform I use (Moodle /Yahoo Groups) and then others can read it. Usually, these chat group task are only one step towards a final task. For example, after the chat, each student writes a paragraph using the information discussed in the session, or sometimes I ask for a group paragraph, which they co-edit before making it public."

-- When two people voice chat at YM, it's preferable that only the person speaking activate Hands free (left side, above the text chat area); the other person should have it disabled, because it interferes with the sound and generally causes an annoying echo.

-- There is also the choice of neglecting Hands free altogether and just clicking Talk when each one speaks. For a presentation, that is not practical. The presenter needs to have Hands free activated, while all others should deactivate it.

-- Webcams (video or image) take up a lot of bandwidth. Though it's possible on a dial-up connection, it's much better on a faster one.

-- Webcams and audio are a very heavy and dangerous mix, because they take up a lot of bandwidth. They may even crash the system, meaning that you may
have to reboot. At YM, we generally try both out for a little while to see one another and take some screen shots, and then we give up on the webcams,
especially when our main aim is for a voice session.

If you are in your office, we just need to highlight your name in the list of the members who are online, and then click on a little "door" icon at the bottom of the list (the list is on the left of the chat applet).

Write help@learningtimes.org if you need any further assistance.
 

To record a session at Alado and save it on your hard disk, you need to have Windows Media Player version 9 or +.
If you have any earlier versions of Media Player, the 'record presentation' feature will be greyed out and, yes, disabled.
-Go to the File menu
-Click on Record presentation
-Save it to your hard disk

You will get 2 files: .wmp (with the sound only), and html file. Click on this one to view and listen to the whole presentation

A sensible rule of netiquette is to always delete all irrelevant content from the replies, including the header and footer (Yahoo wording). Due to the significant number of daily messages, this will also help reduce the size of the daily digests that several participants subscribe and speed up the download for those participants on a dial-up connection.

Remember to use the Compress message after recording feature in View > Options before recording. Messages are saved as .wav files that you can attach to an email message or insert in a Web page after uploading it to your server.

Before recording, turn the mic volume to maximum to be on the safe side. Some still come out low.

You can set the interface to use ten different European
languages, very helpful if your beginner students are not feeling comfortable with English yet.

Voicemail for kids is an even more simplified and very attractive interface based on 3 buttons: record, play and send.

To view messages by topics
-- Go to the View menu (in the main window)
-- Select Current View and Group Messages by Conversation
-- Click the + sign next to some of the messages to see the whole thread.

VIP(oint): This only groups messages with the same Subject line.

You can also make a link with a title:
<a href="url goes here">title</a>

Add things to the sidebar here. Use the format:
<li><a href="URL">Link text</a></li>

follow the instructions. It's basically inserting URLs and a title for each one.

VIP(oint): The URL should end in .jpg or .gif

Blogger offers now the possibility to upload photos from your own hard disk ;-)

Go to What is the word verification option? and follow the instructions.
With this new verification system, you have to perform a little extra task when you want to comment -- it's a test designed to make sure you're a human being rather than a "spam bot", so it should keep the problem down to the few-and-far-between comment spammers who spam by hand.

This is the process:

-Go to Settings>Comments. In comments section scroll down to an option called Show word verification for comments? there you click Yes and then click Save Settings button to save the changes.

Dafne comments on LiveJournal:
"I really like LiveJournal. One of the things I love about it is the fact that you can make comments to comments. It has tons of templates you can select from, and combinations of colors, not to mention that you can customize them just as YGs.

You can make other LiveJournalers your friends and you will see their new posts just by clicking on the "friends" tab, a very convenient feature if you have your students blogging. My graduate students created their blogs in LiveJournal, and now I can see each new entry they post from my blog, and reply to them without leaving my blog.

You can make your journal public or just for your friends (another convenient feature when dealing with young students). Comments can also be public, or for your friends, or for those registered to LJ.

It is very easy to upload pictures without knowing html. You can preview comments and check spelling before sending them.

There are many other features I haven't had time to check, like creating communities, categorizing your friends in groups, and many others."

When you have signed up, two small icons are installed on your menu, 'Sub with Bloglines'and 'My Feeds' they say. Whenever you visit a blog etc of interest to you you click the 'Sub'icon and the site is saved on your personal account.

Now comes the great part: Whenever anything happens on the sites subscribed by you you will be notified. How? Well you have to enter
'My Feeds' on a regular basis, I do it every other day, and there you have a list of all sites you have subscribed to! (Chrissan, 27Oct2005)

A blog is like an online diary, where the blog owner writes something (every day, or even more frequently, or less frequently, however (s)he likes). Most blogs also have a feature that allows readers to add comments to any of the entries - these comments are then visible to all subsequent visitors as well, and they in turn can leave further comments.

A wiki on the other hand is like a public website which one person starts, but which then any visitor is able to change. Instead of being a static webpage therefore (or a collection of static webpages forming a website),
it's a dynamic one, which anyone can edit. It's a bit like putting up a Word document which can be viewed and edited by anyone.

For an example of a wiki take a look at http://www.wikipedia.org - a wiki encyclopedia on which anyone, including you if you'd like to, can edit any
of the entries. (Eric Baber, 26Oct2005)

"Transfer files from your computer to your main directory with this simple tool. First click on Browse... to select files [on your hard disk, CD or floppy], then click Upload Files.

Note: File names cannot contain spaces. The total upload can be up to 5MB."

Your images should be in .jpg or .gif format.

When you get the message that your files have been successfully uploaded, click the File Manager option to see a list of all your uploaded files. To get the URL to your image/s, click on View (to the right of the image name). You will see your image in a new page and you will have the corresponding URL on your browser. Copy it and then you can use it to upload your pictures to your blogs.

The process is similar in Tripod and Bravenet. Once you know how to do it in one, it is easier to transfer your knowledge to new situations.

Or you can also use Easy Thumbnails, which is also great to make thumbnails. It's free, downloadable and easy to work with.

You can change the format of a picture in Paint through Save As.

Or why not a paper backup? A pocket phone book where you can keep them in alphabetical order.

They come in very handy!

To keep track of all the links of interest re: the workshop, create a folder in your Favorites/Bookmarks and then different subfolders to help you sort out things more easily.

Or use de.licio.us, share your links and access them from any computer.

If you are interested, you can join the group, explore the site and read the documents we uploaded.
Go to http://www.nicenet.org/, click on Students: Join a Class (on the right) and on that page enter the class key E47687WZ6 and follow the instructions to join. The name of the class is "Webheads for free".