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This is the bit at the top of the screen that looks like this:-
When you click each of the words (File, Edit, View etc.) a menu descends like this:-
By clicking on things in the menu, the program can be made to perform various tasks. You will have to use menus very rarely, but there are a few times when they become useful:-
Directly underneath the menus lives a creature called the toolbar. It looks like this:-
The toolbar’s function is to help you
with the things you’ll do most often. Because it takes time
to go to a menu, bring it down and select an item, the toolbar
can make finding information that little bit faster. I’ll go
through the functions now, to show you how easy it is:-
The address bar (above) is a crucial part of the toolbar. Put simply, it tells you where you are in the internet at the current time (here were at a site called "Eduweb"). Just like your house address has a number, in a road, in a town, in a county (and even a country), every page on the internet has it’s own personal address, often called a URL or Universal Resource Locator. This enables it to be found by any computer anywhere in the world at any time, which is pretty handy. Address are usually of the form "http://www." followed by whatever the site is called. The only time you’ll really look at the address is when you've got one in your hand that someone's given you to look at, or if you want to note down your current location for another day (alternatively you could use the favourites function for this).
The forward and back buttons are designed to let you move rapidly between pages that you’ve already visited. They’re very simple to use -one press of the back button returns you to the page you last visited, whilst the small downward pointing arrow beside it gives you a menu with all the pages that you’ve recently visited. Just click one to return there.
The stop button is fairly self-explanatory. Sometimes you’ll visit a page that takes a long time to download because it has lots of complicated information (like pictures). When this happens, you might sometimes want to stop the information coming down the line (for instance the text on the page, which normally appears first, may be all that you need) so you can do something else. One click of the stop button does this for you.
The refresh button is one you probably
won’t use very often, but it might be useful in some
circumstances. What it does is reload the current page in the
address bar. This is useful if you’ve previously pressed the
"Stop" button and want to get the rest of the info you
missed first time, or if you're at a page which is constantly
being updated.
The home button returns you to home sweet home – the Parks Nursery Resource Site. One click is all it takes to whizz back.
The search button brings up a box which
enables you to search the internet. I’ll teach you more
about how to do this later (page 17, "Searching for
yourself"), but for now it’s probably not worth
bothering with this button – this isn’t a very
efficient way of searching for what you want.
The favourites button essentially just plants
the list of sites on the favourites menu in a box next to
the left edge of the screen. Just click on a title to visit that
sight.
The history button is very similar to the back
and forward buttons, in that it shows you where you’ve been
and allows you to revisit those locations. The difference is that
the history function retains all the locations that have been
visited by everyone who has used the computer over a fairly long
time period, usually about a month. So if you used the system two
weeks ago and want to quickly revisit a site you looked at then,
this is the button to click.
The channels and full screen buttons are best ignored – for you, they’re really of no great use.
The mail button is there when you want to send an e-mail (or electronic mail). More about this in "Sending your first e-mail", page 16.
The print button does exactly what I says
– prints out the currently displayed page. When the box
comes up with all the printing options, select what you want (see
previous chapter), check the printer is turned on (the lower of
the two buttons on the right hand side), and click
"OK".
The edit button, like the channels and full screen buttons, is essentially of no interest to you – it doesn’t do anything to help you in your quest to search out the information you want.
- The scroll bars and window sizing.
These are crucial little bits of equipment that sit on the right hand side (and sometimes bottom) of the screen. They look like this:-
As you can see there’s a long bar with two arrows, one at each end. Clicking these moves the page up and down, as does grabbing (clicking and holding) the darker grey box and moving that up and down (this box represents the part of the page you can see on screen).
Another (more convenient) way of scrolling the screen up and down is to move the wheel on the mouse that’s situated in between the two buttons. Go on, try it and see. Doing it this way saves time and makes it easier to read a long page without having to constantly fiddle with the scroll bars.
What about those buttons in the top corner with _ , a box, two overlapping boxes, and x on them? These are the controls you use to change the size of the viewing box (called a window) of any program. Pressing these buttons does the following:-
Pressed x or _ symbol by accident and the window's disappeared? Don't panic. If it was the _ symbol, go to the bottom of the screen (the taskbar) where there will be a longish rectangular box with the name of the currently displayed web-page on it (it looks like this:-
where this is a page called "Horizon Hobbies"). Simply click it to restore the window to it's previous size and position. If it was x you pressed, then simply reload the browser by double clicking "The internet" icon in the middle of the screen (to return to where you were go to the final entry in the "History" function of the browser on the toolbar).
That’s it! You now know how to control the browser. Only one more bit to go…
Right then, you've mastered controlling your browser so now you can concentrate on actually looking at the information that's coming from the internet itself. This information is displayed in the main body of the screen, directly below the address bar (it's often called the content of the page). Pages displayed here can be scrolled up and down by the scroll bars (see previous chapter) for easy reading, and location controlled by the address bar, toolbar or menus. But what about the page itself? Can that be used to move around without going near the browser controls?
Can you remember what a link was? That's right, it was the thread of silk in the spiders web that linked one junction (web-page) with another. If we want to travel along that thread from our current location to somewhere else, we are following a link.
How can we do this? Well, it's easier than falling off a log (and a lot less painful!). If you see a word or phrase that looks like this, it means that you can click it and be whisked to a new location with new information. It's fairly safe to say that any word that's underlined and in a different colour than the main body of the text is normally a link. Links can be presented as a bulleted or numbered list, within sections of text (as above), or even as pictures or graphics on screen. That's right, if your on a page where there are no links of the underlined coloured words format but there are some pictures or graphics, try clicking on them - after all, on the internet no-one designs pages that are the computing equivalent of a cul-de-sac. Believe me, there will always be somewhere you can click to go somewhere else, so investigate and don't be scared to click the mouse anywhere you think might be a link. As a last resort, you can always click the "Back" or "Home" buttons to return to a page you know better.
These are, to a certain extent, a peculiarity of the Parks nursery site that I've designed. However, it’s a technique which is used all over the internet to control the way people move around pages and make it as easy as possible for them to get to the information they want, so it's useful to understand them.
Put simply, when you first load up the browser you'll see the front page of the Parks Nursery Web-site. On the !(left hand side)! of the page is a row of yellow buttons which you'll have already seen. When you click on one of these buttons, the content associated with that keyword is displayed in the box alongside, whilst the buttons remain unchanged and ready to be used again to go to your next location. This makes it easy to get to where you want to be within the Parks site, and makes it obvious when you leave the site to go to another one - the margin buttons simply disappear, along with the Parks logo and page style.
Often you'll come upon a page that asks you if you'd like to give the designer some feedback, or simply register that you've visited. Alternatively it could be a site about your child's disability which is having a discussion, or asking for your opinion on something. How do you respond?
Well there's several ways you can do so, and normally you tend to be directed by the page's designer on how they'd like you to get in touch. They might have a form (exactly like any other form you fill in) asking for answers to specific questions which you can fill in and submit to them, or they might suggest you have a live "on-line chat" - you type something and press return, they respond in real time etc. etc. There's even what's called a mailing list, which is where a fairly large common interest group, (which might be on Downs Syndrome for example) can discuss issues. Anyone with a question can "post" it in a public area which can be seen by everyone. That way, anyone who knows the answer or would like to contribute can get in touch with the question poser personally.
However, in a great many cases the method that is used is e-mail, or electronic mail. This is quite simply an electronic letter that can be sent from one computer to another anywhere in the world. The powerful thing about e-mail is that it's virtually instant (within five minutes to anywhere in the world), costs only fractions of pence (for the school it's free!), and is incredibly easy to use. Here's how:-
Often in a web page there will be a link that's something like E-mail us! or Get in touch! Clicking this will automatically open the e-mail program Outlook Express, open a new message, and insert the e-mail address of the person to whom you're writing in the "To" box. Try it and see.
To e-mail someone you'll need their e-mail address. Just like the address where you live, it's of the form of your name at the location you live, e.g.
Someone@Somewhere.something. A real example is the Parks nursery address - parks10@rmplc.co.uk
All you need to do now is insert a title in the "Subject" box at the top of the e-mail, and type whatever you want to say in the big box beneath it. That's it! You don't have to be too formal in e-mails - generally people have given up using "Dear …." and instead just write "Hi" or something! The mail can be as long or short as you like so don't worry if you've got very little (or loads!) to say, as any contribution will generally be valued by the reader, and they will nearly always reply at some point.
When you've finished, just click the "Send" button and your message will wing it's way to just about anywhere in the world. Congratulations, you've just sent your first e-mail!
Got an e-mail address where you want to send some mail, but don’t know how to open the e-mail program? Double click the "Everything else!" folder in the top left of the desktop, then double click "Outlook Express to load the program. Then just click new message, and write the address in the "To" box. Easy!
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The links below
change to these pages in the main web-site window, not
this one!
To view them, click the _ or x symbol in the top right of this
window.
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© Matt Brett, Summer 1999