ICT student textbook/Multi page text document

Making a multi page text document
In this activity, you will make a document which covers the various ideas you want to cover, comprehensively, for a topic. You will learn to use different features of a text editor to make this document clear and coherent.

Objectives

1. Creating a rich text document, containing text, images, tables
2. Formatting the text document, to arrange and highlight data
3. Learning the use of different functionalities in text editor

What prior skills are assumed

1. Familiarity with ICT environment
2. Familiarity with the text editor LibreOffice Writer
3. Understanding of data organization
4. Familiarlty in using LibreOffice Calc to create spreadsheet for recording, analysing and presenting data

What resources do you need

1. Working computer lab with projector
2. Computers installed with Ubuntu Operating System
3. Student generated data sets
4. Secondary data sets
5. Handout for LibreOffice Writer

What digital skills will you learn

1. Preparing a rich text document
2. Inserting images, tables and formatting

Description of activity with detailed steps

Teacher led activity

Creating a multi-page document

Your teacher will help you create a document, based on all the work you have already done. To make the document more useful to the reader, she will show you the following:

1. Entering the information about the topic being worked on
2. Entering the information tabulated earlier in a spreadsheet, in the form of a table in the document
3. Adding section headings to the document whenever a new idea or sub-topic is being discussed
4. Highlighting sections of the text, using features such as making the fonts bold or italicized. You can also change font size and colour
5. Creating an automatic 'Table of Contents' for your document

Student activities

You should prepare a document for your topic. Practice creating sections in your document, to discuss different sub-topics. Run an automatic spelling check on your document, did you identify any spelling mistakes with this tool? Insert a 'Table of Contents' at the beginning of your document. Insert page numbers and name of your document in the footer of the document. Your document will now look like a professionally prepared output.

This 'digital writing' is quite different from writing in your notebook.You can move text across sections, create new sections, delete sections etc. You will notice that it is easy to make changes in the document created by another student, by adding sections, modifying text etc. Thus digital writing also makes it possible to create documents together.

You can also export your text document to the PDF format. The PDF format is not editable and can create a version of your work that is available for ever.

Portfolio

1. In your continuing portfolio, you would include a text document, which will discuss your selected topic in detail, across sections (sub-topics).