Building Home page using Sakai

From ThemesWiki

Scalix

Source Book

ISBN	78-1-847199-40-9
Publisher	Packt Publishing
Author(s)	Alan Mark Berg , Michael Korcuska

To keep your site as simple as possible for users, remove, or at least hide, the tools you do not expect to use in your site. While Sakai speaks of "adding" and "removing", it is perhaps better to think about this as "activating" and "deactivating". Your actions aren't permanent you can always add (activate) a tool later if you decide it will be useful. You can remove a tool using the Add/Remove Tools link in Site Info. To hide a tool, use the Page Order link in Site Info.

The Page Order functionality also allows you to rename tools or to change the order in which they appear. This can be very useful in certain circumstances but use these features cautiously. Changing the name of a tool can confuse users, especially students who may be taking other courses at the same time. Changing the order of the tools is less disruptive to users but can still contribute to a sense of unfamiliarity.

1 Check out the new look
2 Edit your page
3 Replace the site description
4 Customize the Home page
5 Ready to roll
6 Related Links:
7 Additional References
8 Source
9 Other Resources

Check out the new look

Now revisit your site Home page to see how it looks. The panels associated with tools you've removed should no longer appear on the home page and, depending on how your Sakai site is configured, panels may have appeared for some of the tools you've added. At this point, you have a few possibilities for modifying the appearance and functionality of your Home page. You can edit the standard Home page, replace the site description with a different Sakai tool, or even create a custom Home page.

Edit your page

Editing the standard Home page is the easiest option. Earlier in this tutorial, you saw how to edit the site description content using the built-in WYSIWYG editor. If you haven't done this yet, you should do so now. Each tool summary panel also has some configuration options. Explore these to see which options produce the view that you think your users will find most useful when they log in to your site. Try a few options and see what you like best.

You'll also notice that the Announcements summary panel is empty at this point because you haven't sent an announcement yet. Compose an initial announcement about the class so that there is useful content in that summary panel. You can, for example, create an announcement that welcomes students to your class, reminds them of the initial class meeting time and location, and informs them of what to expect in the first class session. If you're using Forums, you'll see that there are no recent posts. Again, consider getting things started. One simple thing to do is create a discussion thread called "Introductions" and post an initial message introducing yourself.

Replace the site description

After creating the initial content and configuring the panels, your Home page is hopefully now both attractive and useful. If you want something different, though, one option is to replace the site description panel with something else. Notice that the site description options include a field for a URL. Enter a URL there, and the page associated with that URL will be displayed instead of the site description content.

You can use this capability to display an external site if you want, similar to how you would use the Web Content tool. But you can also use it to display another tool inside Sakai that may not provide a summary panel for the Home page. For a collaboration site, you might want to display the contents of a Wiki page that contains the minutes from past meetings. You'll need, of course, to grab the URL of the tool you want to display.350-030 1Y0-A05 642-436 EX0-101 Simply right-click (Ctrl-click on a Macintosh) on the link for that tool and select Copy Location to send the URL to the clipboard. Then paste it into the appropriate field in the site description editing screen. Save your changes and take a look at the result. Depending on the tool you've selected and the configuration of your Sakai instance, you may be seeing exactly what you hoped for.

On the other hand, because of the way space is allocated on the Home page, the resulting view may not appear as you expect. There is little you can do at this point with the standard Sakai Home page, although your user support team may be able to help change the spacing of panels on the Home page for you.

Customize the Home page

If, however, you know exactly how you want your home page to look and you can't make the default Sakai Home page appear that way, you can replace the Home page with one of your own construction. The following figure shows an example of just such a site in Sakai.

You can do the same using the Web Content tool and the Page Order functionality in Site Info. Follow these steps:

1. Build a web page or series of web pages using a tool of your choice. Put those pages on a web server somewhere you can probably even put them on the Sakai server using the Resources tool. (If you do this and you're building multiple pages, be careful to use relative links so when you move them to Sakai the links will still work. Also remember that your web pages will appear in the content area of Sakai and therefore won't have the full page width available to them. Be sure to design them accordingly.)

2. Add the web page you created to your Sakai site using the Web Content tool. The Web Content creation process asks you to provide a name for your page. Call it Home.

3. You now have two Home pages in your list of tools. Use the Page Order function in Site Info to move your custom-built Home page to the top of the list.

4. You have two choices about what to do with the default Sakai Home page. You can hide it using the Page Order tool or you can rename it, taking into account the tool summary panels that are available. If, for example, you have the Calendar, Announcements, Personal statements and Forums summary panels, a name like Dashboard or Recent Activity might make sense.

5. Once you are happy with them, save your changes.

Now your custom web page displays as if it were your Sakai site's Home page. And Sakai's Home page is either hidden or has a different name. That's all there is to it.

Ready to roll

Whichever method of constructing a home page you choose, with Singapore SEO Company your site should now be ready to go. Once you're satisfied with the appearance and functionality, send a message to your users to let them know that the site is open for business. The easiest way to do this is to send an email to the site email address inviting participants to log in, take a look around, and, ideally, complete some relevant task (downloading the course syllabus, for example, or introducing themselves on the discussion forum. You can also share the site email address so that everyone knows where messages should be sent.

Of course, all of the preceding suggestions are just that. Experience with Sakai and your style of teaching (or your group's collaboration style) will ultimately determine which tools are most useful to you. There are also new tools and capabilities being introduced on a regular basis so it is likely that you can do much more than is outlined in this tutorial. If you have any doubts, tell your Sakai support team what you'd like to be able to do and they can steer you in the right direction. Or join the Sakai community's Teaching and Learning collaboration group and share your questions and experiences with others.

The Community section of the Sakai web site (http://sakaiproject.org, has instructions for joining the Teaching and Learning group and other groups in the Sakai community.

Additional References

For instructions on Debugging of Sakai error messages, click here

Source

The source of this content is Chapter 9: Building Home page using Sakai of Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide by Alan Mark Berg , Michael Korcuska (Packt Publishing, 2009).