Wrapping your JBC multiple-choice activities in Potato Skins is easier than ever! Just follow these directions, and you will be on your way.
1. Create your JBC activities as usual. When you save your files, use a name with no spaces. (Potato Skins can read file names with spaces, but some versions of Netscape have trouble seeing them!)
2. Place copies of the all the JBC files you want to use with Potato Skins into the "skins" folder inside the Potato Skins folder.
3. Now, you need to tell Potato Skins which files you want to use. Open the "options.jbc" file that comes in your "skins" folder. This is a special JBC activity that Potato Skins reads to learn the names of your activities. It has just one question. In the question box, enter the title that you would like to have Potato Skins show for your activity center.
Next, for each activity you want to include in your Potato Skins activity center, type a title for the activity in an answer box, and the actual file name in the matching feedback box. The file name should not include the ".jbc" part.
4. Open your Potato Skins web page on your desktop to test it out before uploading everything to the Internet.
5. Now, ftp the entire Potato Skins folder to your web site.
That's it!
Probably the biggest change in this version of Potato Skins is its ability to use basic HTML formatting and hyperlinks. The key here is basic!! Potato Skins supports the following set of HTML tags:
Note 1: The <A HREF> tag in Potato Skins can be used to create
hyperlinks, but they won't automatically look like hyperlinks! You will need
to manually underline and/or change the color or your links.
Ex: <font color="#FF0000"><u><a href="http://www.cnn.com">cnn.com</a></u></font>
This will produce an underlined, red link to cnn.com.
Note 2: Potato Skins will simply ignore any html formatting it doesn't support. Experiment with your text, making sure it displays properly in the web browser.
Note 3: Don't try to use an HTML document as your internal reading in Potato Skins. Instead, just have Potato Skins running in one frame, and have your web-page reading in the other frame!
Note 4: Using the <A HREF> tag, you can do all sorts of tricky things, like call up alert boxes in JavaScript. Also, you can target your hyperlinks to open pages in specific frames.
You can now change the appearance of many of the Potato Skins interface elements. In JBC, just open "options|configure output" on the menu bar. Then click on the "appearance" tab to make your changes. Potato Skins 1.0 supports these color customization features: navigation bar color, title color, exercise background color, and text color.
Note 1: The navigation bar color option will change the block of color behind the answer choices on the main Potato Skins question screen.
Note 2: Changes in text color will not affect the text in buttons, the activity report, or the activity menu. It will change the color of the text in the questions, answers, feedback messages, and reading passage.
Note 3: The background color behind most text is always white. Be sure not to choose fairly dark colors when customizing your text.
Use an HTML editor to modify the sample Potato Skins web page to suit your needs. For example, you can define how large the Potato Skins program should be, in either pixels or window percentage. It is possible to have Potato Skins fill the entire screen, regardless of monitor resolution. You can also shrink it down, change its height and width individually, and even change the background color of the activity center.