Realistically, social media is the wave of the future for writing. As such, our kids need to refine and practice their web-design skills as much as their traditional writing skills. The real skill is navigating the great divide between those two skill sets. Traditional teachers will teach traditional writing skills. Contemporary teachers will use 160 character Tweets and texts to teach writing skills. It takes an enlightened educator who's kinda old, but not too old, to teach students to manipulate traditional writing skills to apply to the web-designed world in which we live. Read on, and click deeply if that kind of writing seems important to you, or your students, or your current, past, or future classroom.

Karpie-Created Web-Design Tools

Google Sites Tutorial

This tutorial serves as the "nuts and bolts" tool of our web-design project. It is the one-stop shop for all things Google Sites. While this explains, with obvious arrows and annotations, exactly how to use the Google Sites software, just using the tools provided will do very little by itself. To create an effective website, it will be imperative to offer valuable information by incorporating the text from the Food Chains Connection Tool above, and to follow the advice shared in the web-design considerations Slides shared below.

On the Importance of Photo Layering

Students always go CRAZY with photo layering. They  get excited so they create layers on layers on layers of incomprehensible photos. Do you know why art studios are always a sea of modern, minimalist white walls and lightly stained hardwood floors? To avoid photo layering. I've intentionally offered countless, positive examples of photo layering on my website.

Hyperlinks - "Do's" and "Don'ts"

Hyperlinks are so easy to do correctly that it's just an expression of digital laziness to put in long-form hyperlinks. I'll show you how to insert hyperlinks, in a variety of ways, and demonstrate how inserting hyperlinks correctly just leads to a cleaner, and more user-friendly digital tool.