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For this next segment on the HTML editor we’re going to stay right here in the discussions area
mostly because your use of the HTML editor is generally going to come when you are
composing or replying to a message. So let’s say that we’re going to go ahead and reply to
this message. The first thing that you’ll notice is that because I have the preview pane open it
doesn’t give me very much room. So if you hover your mouse over the bar that separates
the discussion pane from the preview pane, I can go ahead and click and drag this up and
give myself a little bit more room. Now, the next thing that you’ll see is our HTML editor, which
also is not very big. We can go ahead and click and drag on the bottom right hand corner and
resize that whole box for us. Another option is that you have a full screen toggle here. Click on
that and it will make this whole area full screen in the frame that’s available. So now that I’ve
got this kind of where I can see everything a little bit better let’s go ahead and type my
message. I’m just going to put in “My opinion” and let’s take a look at some formatting options
that I have. If I highlight this and click this “B,” it’s going to bold it for me. You can also
italicize and you can also underline anything that you have written in your discussion
message. You also have some other formatting options like alignment, you can go ahead and
make that centered, right justified, or go back to normal. You can make it a bulleted list or a
numbered list. You also have the ability if it’s important to you to insert a table, you can insert
a quicklink to another website, you can insert an image if you like, and the last one is to insert
“stuff” which most often is used to do things like add an embed code for a YouTube video that
you want to share that’s pertinent to the discussion.
So while we’re on the topic let’s take a look at quicklinks for a moment because there are a few
dos and don’ts that you might want to know about. What a lot of students do is they just go
out, they copy and paste their whole URL, and then they go back to the message, they paste it
in there, and the whole thing ends up looking kind of messy so if I go and preview this and pull
it into the course, I’ve got this whole really long web address and it’s not a clickable link. So
let’s talk about how to make it a clickable link. Well the way that you’re going to do that is to
use the quicklink icon. So I’m going to say “Insert a quicklink,” I’m going to choose URL as
the type, now I’m going to paste my URL in here. For the link caption, I’m going to put the
text that a person would actually click on in order to get to this article so I’m just going to
call it “Restoration Article.” And here’s the other important thing. Whether it opens in the whole
window, the same frame, or a new window. If it opens in the same frame, it’s going to open right
here in this class window, which means if I go ahead and read that article and decide I want
out of it and I close it, then I’ve close out my whole course. But if I open it in a new window, I
read the article and I close it, but I still have my course window open so this is going to be our
best option. So once I’m done with that, I can insert it and there’s my article. I can get rid of
all this other junk in there. Once I preview, now I’m going to see that is an actual clickable link
and it’s going to open in a new window. So that’s the best way to use a quicklink.
Sometimes we see issues with students who take things from Microsoft Word and copy and
paste them over into the HTML editor. There’s generally some code or something in the
background that doesn’t translate properly but luckily there’s a way to get around that pretty
easily. So let’s say I worked on this discussion offline, and now I want to go ahead and put it
into the course discussion area. I’m just going to copy and paste this and then I need to go
over to the advance tab. I have two options at my disposal. I’ve got “Paste as Plain Text” and
“Paste From Microsoft Word.” Your best option really is going to be paste as plain text. So now
all I have to do is paste that in there. I do lose some of my formatting so if I want to I can go
back and make things bold and make things underlined but then that way you don’t have any
of that strange stuff going on. So if you end up having problems remember that you go to the
advanced tab and you have the “Paste as Plain Text” and “Paste from Microsoft Word” that will
help you out with that formatting. You also have a built in spellchecker.
So if I click “spellcheck,” look, it shows me that I did not spell “opinion”
correctly, it gives me a suggestion for it and I’m going to go ahead and replace it. Now,
sometimes you’re going to have words that are spelled correctly like “there” but you may not
have used the correct “their” so spellcheck is not going to find that for you and other times you
may have mistyped something and it is so far off from what you meant that it is not going to
find that either. You’re going to have to use some of your own judgment along the way but
this is a way to help you find very simple mistakes and typos in your messages. So I
can apply that and now it has changed my spelling for me. Once I feel like I’m done with
my message, if I want to take a look at it before I post it I can go ahead and preview it. It will
show me exactly what this message is going to look like to others when I go ahead and post it.
Finally, I want to go ahead and post my message but because I went into full screen,
now I can’t see all of the other options available. So I’m going to have to go back out of full
screen. Now I can scroll down to the bottom and I can post my message and it is now
available in the discussion along with all of the other messages. So that’s just a little bit about
how to use the HTML editor to your advantage as you are composing messages in D2L.