OFFICIAL TRANSMISSION FROM

Dear Colleagues,

As you know, our Cyberia Activity Guide has the potential to be a tremendous multimedia Internet resource for students AND teachers of reading and writing. But we need to generate the content together—even if you have but a few sentences to contribute. To help you do this, I am linking you to two downloadable templates (see below) with easy-to-fill-in boxes. One version is a Microsoft Word document; the other version is a Web document that should be opened with a Web-authoring program such as the free NVU program (downloadable at www.nvu.com). Use whichever one you want. Your work will be tech-enhanced later. In fact, Donna Eyestone of the Broadcast Electronic Media Arts Department, an award-winning online teacher, has agreed to help us professionalize the site and incorporate digital video. So, as you've heard me say before, we need to generate content so that we can enhance it.

Here are two easy-to-fill-in templates. USE THESE TO GENERATE AND ORGANIZE POTENTIAL GUIDE CONTENT.

Take your pick. (Then pick a Guide topic. Pick many topics. Fill in the boxes, or at least some of them. Thanks. )

Download the Word version of the Cyberia Activity Guide template.

Download the html or Web version of the Cyberia Activity Guide template.

There a few different ways to find out more about the Cyberia Activity Guide. Even though it is under construction, the site is live at http://www.ccsf.edu/Departments/English/cyberia/guide. Just go there. Once there you will see four sections. Note that the “Planning and Writing” section has a general introduction and a “Revising” page, or “layer of learning,” within it. Btw, the template is based on what you see in the “Revising” page. If you'd rather produce material for a general introduction to a section, just let me know.

You can also learn much more about Cyberia Activity Guide by going to our snapshot at the Carnegie Foundation's new Windows on Learning site. This snapshot is the result of a lot of hard work, so check it out. We received excellent guidance in our Carnegie sessions last year, and the response to the Guide concept, as well as the eventual snapshot, was wonderful. Now we need to make it happen! While at Carnegie, Julie Young, Patricia Delich, and I thought that the Planning and Writing stage would be a good place to begin our Web planning and writing last year, but, as you'll see below and in the Guide itself, there are many topics from which to choose. Please do not feel limited to one, and, remember, it's not like you have to write a whole page.

If you are interested in playing with Web-authoring and have a program like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or NVU with which to open the attached html document, you may find these sites helpful:

http://www.designyourownweb.com/nvu-tutorial.htm (NVU movie tutorials)  

http://learn.dccc.edu/~lori/nvu/index.html (basic NVU tutorial)
 
(The Cyberia Activity Guide also has a page on creating an online syllabus.)  

Well, the categories are in the Guide and are listed below. I'm sure we'll add to and improve upon these too. Send whatever you can in electronic format to ckleinma@ccsf.edu. If you have paper materials that you'd like to transform into multimedia resources, slide them under my door (Batmale 524). It would be great if you could submit something--or the start of something--before spring break. Contact me if you have any questions. Thanks!  

Yhlb, Craig

The Cyberia Activity Guide: PICK A TOPIC, IMPROVE THE TOPICS . . .