Help:Take a tour

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Contents 1 Content Toolbar 2 Personal Toolbar 3 Navigation Menu 4 Utility Tools 5 Search Form 6 Subject Portals

The best way to learn how to use CurriculumWiki is simply to try everything. You can use this tutorial as your tour guide. It points out CurriculumWiki's major features and provides a brief summary of how they work.

Hint: You can open a new web browser window to explore CurriculumWiki and leave this window opened to this Help page. In Internet Explorer, you can open a new window by pressing and holding ctrl and then pressing the n key. In Safari, you can open a new window by pressing command-n or a new tab by pressing command-t.

Content Toolbar

The content toolbar appears as a series of tabs at the top of every page when you are logged into CurriculumWiki. Content tools allow you to interact with CurriculumWiki content as well as other CurriculumWiki contributors.

• Namespace. CurriculumWiki content is grouped into several namespaces. Being familiar with these namespaces will make it much easier for you to navigate CurriculumWiki. The first tab on the content toolbar always contains your current namespace.
  • Activity. The main namespace in CurriculumWiki is the activity namespace. For the purposes of CurriculumWiki, we can define an activity simply as a page that contains any curriculum resource designed for an audience of elementary or secondary school students. Any information intended for educators would go into another namespace, depending on the the type and purpose of the information (see below). The title that you give an activity will also be the name of the CurriculumWiki page containing the activity, such as My Fantastic Activity. You can create an activity simply by creating a new page with this title.
    
  • User. The user namespace contains information about CurriculumWiki contributors. Every contributor has a page in the user namespace, but it is up to you whether to put any information into your page. The title of your page would be User:MyUsername, where User indicates the namespace.
  • Image. The image namespace contains all of the files that are uploaded to CurriculumWiki. The name is not really accurate, because you can upload other types of files. When you upload a file, it is placed in a page titled Image:filename.
  • Category. The category namespace serves as an index of CurriculumWiki content. You can access subject categories through the subject portals (see below). A page in any namespace can be indexed by adding a category tag to the page, such as [[Category:CategoryName]]. CurriculumWiki will automatically show a link to the category at the bottom of the page. When a reader clicks on the link it will take them to an index of all pages in that category. If you add a tag for a category that does not exist, CurriculumWiki will automatically create it. You may insert a category tag anywhere on a page, though it is best to put it at the bottom of the page. CurriculumWiki will display the category links at the bottom of a page regardless of where they are inserted.
  • Help. The help namespace contains all CurriculumWiki help pages. Remember that CurriculumWiki can not only edit help pages but create new ones as well. If you encounter a problem for which you can not find any help, do your fellow contributors a favor and create a help page for it or add it to an existing help page it is appropriate. You can create a help page by creating a new page with a title that begins with the namespace, such as Help:Some topic.
    
  • CurriculumWiki. The CurriculumWiki namespace holds pages that contain information about CurriculumWiki project. Each of the portals, the teacher portal and all the subject portals, are in the CurriculumWiki namespace. If you feel there is a topic that is important to the project that does not already have a portal, you can create a project page with a title that begins with the namespace, such as CurriculumWiki:My interest.
    
  • Template. The template namespace contains boilerplate content that can be used in many pages. The curriculum design frameworks are examples of templates. Templates can become rather complex, so you will probably want to become very familiar with CurriculumWiki before you attempt to create one. You can get more information about templates on the Meta-Wiki.
• Talk Every content namespace in CurriculumWiki has a linked talk namespace. Talk provides a way to comment on a page without editing the page itself. It is a good way for contributors to collaborate on an activity or other page because you can use the talk page to reach a consensus before making changes. The "talk" tab for any namespace will always appear on on the content toolbar, so they are very easy to find!
• Edit (View Source).The "edit" tab allows you to edit any page in CurriculumWiki unless it has been protected by a site administrator. In general, only the Home page and pages related to curriculum design templates are protected. On these pages, the tab will say "view source" instead.
• History. The "history" tab contains links to every version of a page that has ever existed. A page's history allows you to link to a particular version (see toolbox below). You can also use page history to revert the page to an earlier version by clicking on the "edit" tab and then the save button. The older version will then become the current version of the page, so it should be avoided in almost all circumstances. You can link to the version you prefer without overwriting the current version. Of course, other users can still link to the overwritten page, and can even revert to that version. It's easy to see why reverting a page to a previous version is almost never productive. It serves no purpose other than to interrupt the evolution and improvement of the page.
• Watch. The "watch" tab allows you to monitor changes in a particular page. If you want to keep track of changes in a page, just click on the "watch" tab and it will be added to your watchlist on the personal toolbar (see below).

Personal Toolbar

The personal toolbar contains links to information relevant to you as an individual CurriculumWiki user.

• My Page is a link to your page in the User namespace. The name of your user page will be User:YourUsername. Creating a page for yourself will help other users know more about you and foster a culture of professionalism among CurriculumWiki contributors. You can link to your page from the "Author" section of any activities you contribute. You can also use your page to provide links to activities for your students. Once your students learn the address of your page, they will be able to find any activities you have selected for them quickly and easily.

• My Talk is a link to your page in the Talk namespace, which always appears as the "talk" tab in the content toolbar when a reader is viewing your user page. The name of your talk page will be User_talk:YourUsername. You can use your talk page for discussions with other CurriculumWiki contributors.

• My Watchlist contains links to all the activities you have chosen to monitor by selecting the "watch" tab in the content toolbar.

• My Contributions contains links to all the activities you have created or edited.

• My Preferences allows you to change certain settings relating to email, image files, editing, date and time, and search. You can customize CurriculumWiki just for you, but it is probably a good idea to become well acquainted with CurriculumWiki before you experiment with different settings.

• Log Out ends your CurriculumWiki session and deletes the cookie that is set when you log in.

Navigation Menu

• Home always takes you back to the CurriculumWiki Home page.

• Teacher portal takes you to the main CurriculumWiki project page.

• Popular pages takes you to a list of the CurriculumWiki activities that have been viewed most frequently.

• New pages takes you to a list of the most recently created CurriculumWiki activities.

• Recent changes takes you to the most recently edited pages in any CurriculumWiki namespace.

• Feeling lucky takes you to a random CurriculumWiki activity.

• Help provides tutorials for getting started in CurriculumWiki and links to other websites where you can get more information.

Utility Tools

The toolbox provides some utilities to make certain tasks easier.

• Upload file allows you to upload files to CurriculumWiki. The files will be stored in the Image namespace, even though you may upload others types of files.
• Printer friendly opens the current page with no navigation so that it will print more efficiently and effectively. This format can also be useful for readers who prefer a simpler layout and larger text.
• Link to this version changes the address of the current page to include the number that identifies the current version of the page in the database. You can copy and paste this address into your page in the User namespace or another web page and always return to this version of the page, no matter how often the page is subsequently edited.

Search Form

Searching a wiki is a little different than using the search engines (such as Google) or directories (such as Yahoo) that you are probably more familiar with. There are two buttons on the search form, "go" and "search." The "go" button is the default, and will be selected if you press enter after typing your search terms. The "search" button will find all files that contain one of your search terms. If there is a page in CurriculumWiki with exactly the same title as your search terms, then the "go" button will take you directly to that page without showing you any other search results. By default, only the main (activity) namespace is searched. If you want to search other namespaces, you can do so from the search results page or you can change your preferences on the personal toolbar to search other namespaces by default. Some tricks that work on search engines and directories, such as enclosing an exact phrase in quotation marks, do not work in a wiki. If you want to know more about searching a wiki, you can visit the Meta-Wiki.

Subject Portals

Subject portals provide a place for teachers to publish information about the subjects that they teach. The information should generally be limited to the how CurriculumWiki can be used in that subject or at least how technology can be integrated in that subject. If you are not sure if something is appropriate for a subject portal, you can suggest it on the talk page. If you want to create a portal on a topic of interest to you, you can create a new project page in the CurriculumWiki namespace (see above).