Whipple Hill - Create My Portal
1. On SCHOOL PORTAL, click CREATE MY PORTAL (upper right).
2. Enter SORT number ("10") and a NAME for your portal ("Scott's Portal"), then click ADD.
3. Click EDIT next to the your portal's name.
4. Under SCOTT'S PORTAL, note Currently Customizing: Scott's Portal at top. Click tab ADD CONTENT.
5. Click ADD SPORTS CALENDAR, ADD SCHOOL CALENDAR, MY GROUPS, and MY LINKS. On your portal, each of these will be shown in a separate box (with header), called a "channel" by Whipple Hill. Note CONTENT ADDED at top after you add each one.
6. Click CHANGE LAYOUT. Click THREE COLUMN.
7. Put the mouse on the one of the channel names. The mouse will change to a 4-directional cursor, allowing you to drag that channel to any of the three columns. You can place channels above and below others. I'm going put one channel in the left column, one in the middle, and two in the right.
8. In this example, I put SPORTS CALENDAR in the left colum, SCHOOL CALENDAR in the middle column, and MY GROUPS and MY LINKS in the right column.
9. Click link SCOTT'S PORTAL (at the top) to see it. Though the SPORTS CALENDAR, SCHOOL CALENDAR, and MY GROUPS are populated, the LINKS channel is not. In the LINKS channel, click OPTIONS.
10. On the next screen, pull down NUMBER OF ITEMS TO SHOW and select 10. Scroll down on that page to ROLES and check STUDENT if you're a teacher, NON-TEACHING STAFF if you're a staff member, and STUDENT if you're a student. Click SAVE AND EXIT
11. Click link SCOTT'S PORTAL (at the top) to see the finished product.
12. You can add an RSS channel (from Wikipedia: "RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content including, but not limited to, blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts"). RSS feeds are updated automatically in that channel.
- Back in step 4, add an RSS Reader channel to your portal and position it where you'd like it.
- Display your portal. In the RSS Reader channel, click OPTIONS.
- In another window, do a Google search for "RSS feeds". I found links for feeds from Yahoo, CNN, New York Times, NPR, and the like. At the NPR site, there are separate addresses for Top Stories, U.S. News, World News, Politics and Society, and the like. The address for Top Stories is "http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1001". Enter/paste that into the RSS FEED URL box and click SAVE AND EXIT.
- RSS feeds can be also be displayed in normal browser windows (instead of being crammed in a small Whipple Hill channel. Bookmark the feed and bring it up in a separate window.
13. Here's Scott's Portal with an RSS feed from NPR.
14. Though Whipple Hill opens automatically to the SCHOOL PORTAL when you log in, you can choose your custom portal by pulling down PORTAL VIEWS (under SCHOOL PORTAL).
-Scott Smith
March 2008