I. The first Day:

A. Start – Up:

1. Welcome to the Class.

a. Assigned seating: Each student is assigned to a workstation (one computer) in alphabetical order by last name.

b. Take attendance and fill out information cards.

· 1st line: Last Name, First Name, M. I.
· 2nd line: leave blank
· 3rd line: Street Address
· 4th line: City (or village), State, Zip code
· 5th line: leave blank
· 6th line: Write your home phone number as follows:1- (__ __ __) __ __ __ - __ __ __ __
· 7th line: leave blank
· 8th line: Write your email address, if you have one.

c. Summer School Rules and Policies:

· Summer Dress Code: modified
· Attendance Rules: Since one day is equivalent to one week during a regular semester, you are only allowed one day absence. If you miss more than one day, it is an administrative decision as to whether you will still be allowed credit in the class.
· Tardy Rules: Days Tardy are tracked by the administration.
· All other student handbook rules not described here are in place during summer school sessions.

d. Classroom Policies and Procedures:

· This three week, 4 hour per day class is a one-semester course allowing you to earn 0.5 credit.
· Each single day is equivalent to a whole week during a regularly scheduled semester.
· Homework each day will amount to several hours of studying and preparation for the next day’s class.

e. Evaluation and Grading:

· The Marian grading scale is used to assign letter grades based on the percentage of points earned throughout the course.
· You will have a Final Exam.
· You will have Daily Quizzes.
· You will have a Web Page Project about astronomy.

f. The Web Page Project:

· You are going to be shown how to create a simple web page about a topic in astronomy.
· The topic you are assigned will be about something found in our own solar system.
· You will use a simple web page making program built into the Netscape browser called Composer. No programming skills are necessary to do this so don’t panick. Composer is a very user friendly piece of software that allows you to create a web page based on wysiwyg, which means “What you see is what you get.
· You will be assigned your astronomy topic on the first day, and will be provided with instructions on how to get started on the project. Everything you need to know to make this a positive, successful experience will be taught to you during class.
· The project is to be done in class and will NOT be part of any homework. Should you decide that you want more time than is scheduled in class, arrangements can be made to stay after class or to come early on certain days.

g. A Night Out: Observational Astronomy (working with a telescope):

· Many inexperienced people think that astronomers spend most of their time behind the eyepiece of a telescope. In fact that is far from the truth in today’s world. They spend time studying images captured by telescopes both on the ground, in orbit around the earth, and on probes sent to observe objects in our own solar system.
· Many large research telescopes do not even have eyepieces, but rather have a CCD (charge-coupled device), which is essentially the eye of a digital camera, and gathers images for storage in computers for later analysis.
· You will have an opportunity to study and work with telescopes. Some of our work will be during class where we will examine, study, and learn to focus telescopes.
· You will also have the opportunity to attend a star party at the end of the course, where we will be taking one or more telescopes out to apply what we have learned.
 

1. Assigning you a topic: Your Topic is ___________________________.

2. Starting a WEB PAGE DOCUMENT (a file)

a. To begin you will open Netscape “Composer” [NOT Netscape]
· Go to the START MENU
· Go to PROGRAMS and Click the left mouse button
· Go to NETSCAPE and click the left mouse button
· Go to COMPOSER and click the left mouse button
· You now have an untitled blank web page in the composer window. This web page is in an editor mode and you can type, create tables, insert pictures, etc, while in this mode.
b. As you look at the top assortment of buttons and tools you will see at the very top a “drop down menu bar” having the labels FILE, EDIT, etc., as you read from left to right.
c. Now go to these “drop down menus” at the very top. As you move the mouse over these buttons they appear raised but no pop up description boxes appear. Click on each of these buttons and look at what kinds of options they provide. Some of these you will learn to use frequently while other may never be used in this project.
d. Next, take a few minutes to look at the tool bars and symbols and move the mouse without clicking it over the symbols to see the pop up descriptions that appear for each of the symbols. Some of these symbols you will become familiar with and some you may never use.
e. Move your Mouse to upper left “Drop Down” button labeled “File” and left click the mouse on it. Once again observe the choices you have. Move your mouse down to “Save As…” and left click on it. Next …
f. A window will open that asks you to give your web page a name. Call it: (your) First Name – Last Name. Click OK. Next…
g. A window will open that will allow you to pick where you want to save your web page. Select the H:\ drive, the Summer Astronomy Class folder, and the folder with your name. When this folder is open, click SAVE in the “Save As…” window. To be sure your page is saved go back to the “File” button click and select “Open”. You should see your web page there in the folder with your name on it. While the “Open” window is still opened, call your instructor over to see that you have done this correctly. Once he gives you his OK, close the Save As… window.
h. Now, in Composer, type the phrase “My Astronomy Web Page”. It appears in the upper left corner at the top of the web page. Next in the tool bar find the tool symbol which has the description “Load this page into Navigator”. When you do this you see your page in the Netscape Navigator browser, just as it would appear to someone else, if you had your web page hosted by an ISP (Internet Service Provider) on the world wide web.
i. Next, click the mouse just to the left of the text phrase “My Astronomy Web Page”. The flashing cursor will appear just to the left of the “M” in the word My. Next move your mouse over the tool symbol(s) that describe alignment and select the one that says “Align Center”. Left click your mouse on this symbol. You should now see your phrase “My Astronomy Web Page.” In the center at the top of the page.
j. As the final step in this part of today’s work on your website enclose the phrase in quotes and highlight the whole phrase including the quotes. [Highlighting can be done by either dragging the mouse over the text while the left mouse button is held down or by placing the cursor to the left of the text and use the right arrow to move the cursor over the text while holding the shift key down.] While the text is highlighted increse the font size to two times larger than it current size, called the default size. You can probably accomplish this by clicking on the “Larger Font Size” tool button symbol twice.
k. Click on the tool button symbol that looks like a floppy disk. This will let you save the changes to your previously saved web page. From now on, any changes that you make to this web page file, can easily be saved, by using this tool button symbol.
l. Close the Composer window. If you fail to save your changes, windows will ask you one last time whether you want changes saved before the window closes. If you failed to save something, and you intended to, say yes or ok.

3. Doing The Research:

a. Now that you have been assigned a topic, you will need to collect information about the topic in order to create your web page on the assigned topic. The instructions that you will receive will guide you through the process of gathering the necessary data and using it in the creation of your web page.
b. Your best source of information will be classroom instruction and authoritative web sites. You may also want to use library sources such as recent books, science and astronomy publications such as Sky and Telescope and Astronomy.
c. Each day during the first week of class you’ll be given more instruction about creating your web page, and will be given some time to work on it. During the second and third week, you will be given some classroom time to finish the project and get it ready to present to the class on the second to the last day of class.
d. Anyone who wishes extra time to work on their web page may make arrangements to come early or stay late on certain days.