Formatting the Web Gradebook Class Information for the Parent Portal

The parent portal provides information about each class a student is taking, including a section description. Staff members can access the same information from the Quick Lookup screen in PowerTeacher (Figure 1, click for larger view in a new window/tab).

Figure 1: Representative View of a Class Page on the Parent Portal

Your course (i.e. section) description may be entered or modified by clicking on the Class Info icon at the top of the PowerTeacher Web Gradebook (Figure 2, click for larger view in a new window/tab).

Figure 2: Class Info Screen in the PowerTeacher Web Gradebook

The course description is a very useful way to convey information to students and parents about your course policies, how you calculate grades, etc. Without adding some formatting tags, however, it simply all runs together into one long paragraph (Figure 3, click for larger view in a new window/tab).

Figure 3: Unformatted Class Description

TAGS

What are tags? Tags are codes written in the language of the web (HTML) that tells a web browser how to display information. Tags are always enclosed within the less than/greater than braces, i.e. < >. Most formatting commands require both an opening and closing tag which surround the text you want to format, one to turn on the formatting and one to turn it off. Closing tags have a slash, i.e. "/", in addition to the braces, e.g., </ >.

For the purpose of your course description, the following tags may be useful.

Format	Opening Tag	Closing Tag	Example/Comments
Bold	<B>	</B>	<B>Bold</B>
Italics	<I>	</I>	<I>Italics</I>
Underline	<U>	</U>	<U>Underline</U>
Line break (carriage return)	<BR>	none required	Use two <BR>s to add a blank line between two lines of text.
Paragraph	<P>	</P>	Sets off paragraphs of text.
Image	<img src="http://www.websitewhereyourimage exists.com/imagename.jpg>	none	<img src="www.falmouthschools.org/porter/chemistry.jpg">
Web Link	<a href="http://www.websiteyouwanttolinkto.com" target="_blank" >	</a>	<a href="http://www.falmouthschools.org" target="_blank" >Falmouth Schools Website</a> Falmouth Schools Website
*Note: You may also use the Add Web Link button (Figure 2) to insert a link.

In addition, multiple tags may be applied to a single section of text. For example if you want to both bold and italicize a word, you would type: <B><I> Example </I></B>

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