Children creating Web sites using Textease and Dazzle

Children in our Year 4, 5 and 6 classes have just had their first attempt at creating a web site.  I was very keen that they used Textease and Dazzle, as these are the programs with which they were already familiar. We used Textease version 5.47 and Dazzle Plus.  (We had upgraded both of these programs from earlier versions). 

The first task for the children was to plan out their pages and where the links would go.  This is really important, to ensure there are no muddles or lost links later on.  Next, they decided which work they would include and scanned in images of their art work, or took photos with the digital camera if the work was too large for the scanner.

The children had already researched a variety of sites on the Internet  when working on the various topics and had saved a number of images on to disk.  Next, they re-sized the images as necessary, using either Dazzle or a photo editor.

 Note - check carefully that there are no copyright restrictions - this is usually mentioned on the web site if there are such restrictions.  For this reason, we didn't scan any work from books.  The map the children had used for their field work in Chichester we thought would be  copyright. In any case, it is difficult to read scanned text on the screen unless you choose high resolution, which makes the resultant image too large for the Internet.  Nadine, therefore, drew her own map and scanned this.  She imported the image into Textease and then put all the street names outside her image and dragged them onto it. (You can't type directly on to the image).  She even managed to turn some of the street names sideways.  This was quite tricky, but she was very pleased with the results.

To make the buttons, the children scanned in the images, imported them into Dazzle and then used the Area and Scale tools to resize the images.  It was then necessary to make a new picture size, otherwise the browser would still consider the image to be large.  It is easy to do this in Dazzle - just click New Picture and change.  You can give specifications in mm, cm or pixels.  The children were happy with mm. The picture they had scanned was then imported from the clip board and stamped. (Note - the old version of Dazzle will not allow irregular cutting or saving as Jpegs).

To make the photo with the diffuse edges shown on the Home Page of the Romans site, the children first cut out the part of the photo they wanted, using the irregular Area tool.   They then saved this to the clipboard, which turned it into a stamp.  A new page was selected and this cut image stamped on to it.  They worked around the edge with the diffuser brush.  The image was then saved as a Jpeg.

The next task was to import all the images onto a word bank in Textease.  It is very easy to do You also need to go into Looks and set the paper size to Poster.  This gives you a continuous page.

The children were then all set to write their pages.  When they wanted to insert a picture, all that was necessary was to click on the word bank and drag the required image on to their page.  No fussy tables - just click where you want on the page. Magic!

It is important that all editing is done in Textease before converting to html..  One problem the children had was that when they did convert their Textease pages to html, lots of the pages looked different - many of the fonts were in different sizes, although they had selected the same size.

After a phone call to Softease, (manufacturers of Textease) who have an excellent technical back-up team - very friendly and helpful, I discovered what the problem was.  When converting to html, boxes are put round all images.  If these boxes overlap, both text and image are saved as an image and thus have a different appearance. 

The solution is to click on CTRL and A. (CTRL and Z undoes this). This will show you where all the boxes are and the children then found it quite simple to move them around.  Unfortunately, we did not discover this until the Tudor site was saved and working, so there are still some instances of this on the site.

When all the pages had been checked - the children printed out copies and laid them all out so that they were sure where all the links would be.

It is a good idea to make a temporary site and just save each page as html (no links) just so that you can check what it looks like in a browser.  This saves messing about after the children have made the links. 

Next,  they were ready to make the links.  This is easily done in Textease.  When this has been done and all is working, you can save each page as html.  Create a folder for your website and save everything into it.  There is no need to worry about the images - Textease saves them automatically.

The Year 6 Earth in Space site was constructed rather differently.  The main pages were made in Textease but the Home page was constructed in Front Page because the children wanted to use Dynamic HTML (planets zooming in etc!)  The children saved each individual page made in Textease to html and then imported the pages into Front Page.  They then made the links and bookmarks in Front Page.  This seemed to be a very good compromise.

NOTE:  IWhen uploading your website be aware that file names are case sensitive.  Make sure, therefore, all your file names are exactly the same case structure, no commas, spaces etc.  I hadn't realised this and this caused problems when importing the sites into Front Page and uploading them.  

I think the thing with which I was most pleased was the fact that the children could do everything themselves.  They were already familiar with the software and readily understood how the links etc. worked.

The children's work can then be uploaded into your school web-site. We are using Microsoft Front Page for the main site.  (Although Textease is wonderful for the children's pages, it really isn't suitable for managing a large, complex site.) 

The children are really proud of their results.

Rosemary Gledhill

ICT Co-ordinator

Jessie Younghusband School, Chichester.

The main body of this article was published on the West Sussex Grid for Learning and in the autumn term  MAPE newsletter.

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