Hello, Brave Editors!
Hi, people interested in OER!
Everything outside of this text box was initially used for an in-class training session with some of Liza Long’s English 211 Literary Analysis students at the College of Western Idaho, who are writing Beginnings & Endings.
If you prefer to learn by experimenting yourself, please jump right in to doing the below “Icebreaker” in the part and chapter with your name. You’ll probably find it easiest to keep this page open in one browser window and edit your part and chapter in another. If you don’t already have a part and chapter with your name, please reach out to your Pressbooks administrator.
If you prefer to learn from demonstrations or discussions, please email me at jonathan.lashley@edu.idaho.gov. We can figure out a time to Zoom or get you going in whatever way will work best.
If you’re looking to borrow this “digital icebreaker” training, please do! There are pedagogical and settings details in the Pressbooks Administrator Instructions page.
One last tip: whenever you paste any text initially written outside of Pressbooks (such as from Microsoft Word or Google Docs) into Pressbooks, you might find it easiest to first copy and paste it into a plain text editor program, save it, then copy and paste it again into Pressbooks. Using a plain text editor (like TextEdit on Mac, Notepad on Windows, or Visual Studio Code on Mac, Windows, and Linux) as an intermediary can help quickly remove the “behind the scenes” style formatting code that Word and Google Docs sneakily apply to text in their documents. If you prefer to avoid outside applications, you can also select text after you’ve copied it into Pressbooks, then use the “clear formatting” button, which is the icon that looks like a blocky whiteboard eraser.
Looking forward to working with you!
Except where otherwise noted, the content in this guide is by Ryan P. Randall and is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
You’re welcome to use, distribute, remix, adapt, and otherwise build upon this material, provided you give attribution.
Let’s try a digital publishing icebreaker for learning this interface.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is as follows.
Round One: Content
In the left column menu, select “Organize,” scroll down to the part with your name, click the “Add Chapter” button, and then please try to do these things:
- Add a Chapter and name it something that looks like a title. Maybe use the name of a pet, your favorite vehicle / movie / band, a place you want to visit, or whatever else makes you happy.
- Add a line of words at the top of the chapter page
- Add a sentence or two of description.
- Add a link if you can. To keep it quick, maybe just link to a Wikipedia page about that type of pet, vehicle / movie / band, or place?
- Add another set of words. Maybe come up with a slogan for whatever you’ve written about so far?
- Add one last paragraph. It can be whatever you’d like. You can even just bash the keys a while! (Please just don’t break your keyboard, Hulk.)
At this point, hit the Preview button on the right side of this page, then wait up to about a minute for it to load. Unless you’ve already applied styles, everything you’ve added to your chapter so far should be the same font size and style.
When you’ve done that and seen the content so far, come back to the Editor page and start on Round Two.
Round Two: Styles
Now, let’s try to work on applying styles to the content you’ve already written.
Applying proper style is not just important for aesthetics with online writing, but also to make the content accessible for people who use screen readers or other assistive technologies.
To learn more about web accessibility, the A11Y Project’s Everyday Accessibility tips are a great place to start. BCcampus Open Education also has a great Accessibility Toolkit that is very useful for OER works.
- Go back to that top, “title” line and apply the “Heading 1” style. You can do that by highlighting the line, clicking on the drop-down menu that probably says “Paragraph” at the moment, and clicking on “Heading 1”.
- Go back to that sentence or two of description and make any word you’d like be bold. Then make another word italicized. You can even make a third phrase be both if you want!
- Then, go to that “slogan” set of words you added. Highlight it, then apply the “Heading 2” style.
- Then, on a new line, click on that same style drop-down menu and select Preformatted. Then type “This message will self-destruct in one minute.” And then hit the red Save button on the right of the page. You’ll probably see a little animated wheel spin for a few seconds. At this point, look at the Preview again to see the new formatting you’ve applied. Then come back to the editor for one last thing. We need to make that ⚠️self-destruct⚠️ warning go away, since it’s not really automatic!
- Wait about a minute, then click on the little “Browse” link above that red Save button. It’ll take you to a view that has two columns of text and a slider at the top. If you drag the slider to the left, you can go back to any previous version you’ve saved. Drag it to the left just a little and you should be able to see a version without that last “This message will self-destruct in one minute.” Then, hit “Restore.” If you ever mess up as you’re editing, this is how you can undo your changes. (To quickly undo smaller changes, you can also use the ↩️ left-U-arrow or command/control-Z to undo, and the ↪️ right-U-arrow or command/control-Y to redo.)
- When you are all done editing your chapter page and have saved, you may “view” the page by clicking the option in the red banner at the top of the page.
Okay! That’s most of what you might want to do with Pressbooks!
Of course, when you have any other questions—especially with more advanced things like organizing chapters and parts—please just ask!
