Mission Impossible

Dilemma:
You teach a blogging class at the local library. The class is tonight, but your boss tells you the internet is down for the rest of the day, but the class is still going ahead as scheduled.

Your mission:
You have 1 and 1/2 hours to build a new 1-hour curriculum still based on blogging WITHOUT using the internet. Go.



So when I was something like 12 years old I lived in San Diego, and I was lonely (frowny face). So one day my brother came to visit and I asked him how his college classes were going. He told me that he learned how to make web pages, and I asked him how. He realized that he could show me how to do a few simple things on my computer.

So he had me open up Notepad (of all programs!) and showed me how to save a web page file right on my computer. Then he taught me little html codes that I could type in, and when I opened it in Internet Explorer - voila! Italics! Underlining! Titles and headlines! Images and links! Oh, I felt so special.

When I got to high school and there was a web page creation class I thought, "Awesome, I'm practically a pro already." So I took the class and learned how to do even MORE stuff and create even fancier pages - like with borders and dancing images, the best 1999 had to offer!

Then I got to college, and it turns out some of that dinky "web experience" meant that I could do little odd jobs at my brother's office. So I did that, and I learned how to do more and more and more... with a lot of help. And then I flexed my web-page-creating muscles and felt so powerful, mwa ha ha!

And then one day I had to teach a class on blogging with NO internet. And I remembered those very early days when I was just typing in puny html codes on my computer and watching them come to life in Internet Explorer - without actually needing to use the internet.

And that's how I figured out how to teach a WHOLE HOUR of blogging with no internet connection.

*bow*


(Some notes if you feel like you need some explanation: understanding even very basic html codes can help you understand blogging better. Most of the time Blogger.com creates html code for you, but knowing what html code looks like and how it works can help you to fix problems, edit things, and even add code from other websites - like adding videos from YouTube. VERY handy. By the end of tonight's class, my students could recognize what the code looks like when Blogger adds an image for you, and the knew how to move it around or add text before and after. They also knew how to tell the difference between what code looks like for an image, what it looks like for a link, and even what it looks like for something big like a YouTube video. I was so proud.)