Week 9 - Internet for International Communication

Week 9: June 19, two classes

First Class: Address books
Second Class: Signature Files

In the first class, I led the students through the process of setting up their address books. Two handouts were given to them. (The links which follow open up outside of this frame for ease of printing. They are rather large, though, so I would suggest that you right-click and choose "open link in new broswer window". Mac users should click and hold instead of right-clicking.)

The first handout (41 K) went through the steps of adding a name and e-mail address by hand. I also told them to add a name in the "nickname" field. (By the way, the name and address on the handout are not real. "Taro" is a common first name for males. "Haro" is a katakana form of "hello". The e-mail address means "sample-fake".)

I had them add my e-mail address as the first one, and asked them to practice by sending me a message. (There are two ways. The way we did it was to open a new message, and double-click the words Mail To:, and then double-click the name in the address book. When finished, hit OK. The other way is to open the address book first, and double-click a name. An e-mail message then opens up.)

The second handout (49 K) delt with adding the e-mail address of someone who has sent you a message. The bottom of the handout says that the next steps are easy; they are the same as the final steps taken when adding an address by hand, as described above. Be sure to tell the students to check the "Name" -- depending on how the sender has set up her own mail preferences, the "Name" feild might contain a repeat of the e-mail address.

Second Class: Signature file

In this class, we created signature files (sig files) for the e-mail. Note that each person's Netscape may have been installed a bit differently, so you should make sure that you know where Netscape is on the computer. You need this information to tell students where to save their sig file. It will make everything go more smoothly if they save it in a place where Netscape looks automatically, especially if you'll have them select this at the start of each class. On my students' computers, it was in the "normal" place (with each : meaning "next level down" or "double click the icon to open").

My Computer: C: Program Files: Netscape: Navigator: Program: (save)

Here are the steps.

Give them an example of a sig file. (Write one on the board, or send each a message, etc.)
Have them open WordPad (in Japanese, uado pado). (To open it: Start, to Program, to Accessory, to WordPad. If you're teaching in Japan, you'll see that all of these words are written in katakana.)

They type their sig file. I wrote this on the board:

   Haro Taro
   Student, Aso Foreign Language Travel College
   Fukuoka, Japan

Save as a text file inside the "Program" folder of Netscape.
In Netscape, choose Mail Options, then Identity.
Click on "Browse" next to the Signature file space in Indentity.
You should open up inside the "Program" folder of Netscape. (That's why we put the sig file there.)
Click the sig file icon (the one created in WordPad). Chose "Open", then "OK".
That's it! For nearly all of the students, if they now open a new message, they will see their sig file added at the bottom of the message. (If any students do not, there might be something wrong with Netscape. I don't know how to fix it. If the student closes Netscape, though, then restarts Netscape, it should appear.

I also did a quick web search for "signature file art", and found some very interesting sites which gave examples sig files with pictures that people had created using typed characters.

The students took the opportunity today to write messages to me and each other. Others used extra time to write to their e-mail pen pals. I noticed one corresponding with a person she found on Dave's ESL Cafe. Know what she was doing? She was explaining what her name meant. She didn't copy/paste from her Kanji Project page; instead, she was working it into a regular paragraph.