Using the Web

Making web pages a part of your exchange project adds pictures and even sound and/or video to your project. If your group, for example, is introducing your school to partners in Japan, a few pictures with commentary will help students far better visualize the people with whom they are communicating.

As discussed in the section on equipment, a digital camera and/or scanner are likely necessities for producing pages with your own pictures or art. If no one in your group knows how to make pages using straight HTML or an editor, then you'll need to learn, but don't worry; even if you are coding the pages yourself, a couple of days of good practice will get you where you need to be. Check a book out of your local library or try an on-line tutorial.

The simplest pages allow you to introduce your group, individually if you wish, and your school to your overseas partners. Getting students to write descriptions in both English and Japanese also makes for a good language activity.

This brings us to viewing and producing pages in Japanese. If you already have an underlying Japanese system (Japanese Windows for the PC or the Japanese Language Kit for the Mac), then you may not have to do anything to take in a Japanese site. If you do have one of these systems installed and you still get gobbledygook (pardon the technical jargon), look under the 'views' menu and click on 'encoding'. There should be an item called 'Japanese Auto-Detect'. Click that and hope for the best.

If you don't have an underlying Japanese environment, you need a helper program to handle Japanese pages. For the PC, there is a program called NJWIN that you use with your browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, etc.) that will allow you to read Japanese pages. Other products are being developed and refined, some of which are free (unlike NJWIN). To find out about such software, check a commonly updated site on Japanese language such as Keiko Schneider's Bookmarks.

As for putting Japanese into your pages, there are two choices. If you are able to do general word processing in Japanese, you can simply include what you write in your HTML files. This allows the Japanese text to appear just as English text would, wrapped according to the size of the browser window. However, only people using computers with a Japanese environment will be able to read your pages. If your page is intended solely for a partner program in Japan, this is fine, but if students outside of Japan are also potential readers of your page, picking another path is perhaps preferable.

Reading web pages without some sort of Japanese support yields a mess as long as what you are trying to read is text. If the text is placed on a page as a graphic, however, everyone will be able to read it. The reader won't be able to change the appearance (wrapping, size, etc.) of the words, but at least the mess is gone. Take a look at my students' pages at our school's site. You get there by clicking on 'The Thunderously Hip Japanese Language Program' under the 'What's Cool' bar. The pages are in the 'Community' section.

A third possibility is to create two pages, one with the Japanese as text and the other with the Japanese as a graphic. This takes a little more time, but might serve your educational purposes.

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