Helpful Tips for Using this Site

Scroll down to read technical tips for navigating, viewing, and printing from this site.

The quick tour will introduce you to scrolls and Textmapping, and point you to some of the more important pages on the site.

This site is a free resource for teachers, homeschoolers, and researchers. We'd like to encourage you to print, copy, and share the information that you find here. For more on this, please see our copyright[http://www.textmapping.org/copyright.html] page, as well as the small print at the bottom of this page.

We focus on reading comprehension skills instruction, however much of the information on the site is also directly applicable to writing instruction, study skills instruction, content area instruction, special needs instruction, and inclusive classrooms.
Read more about The Project >> [http://www.textmapping.org/project.html]

The techniques discussed on this site can be easily adopted for learners of all ages, from pre-school through adult, and are appropriate for a wide range of situations, including mainstream, special needs and ESL classrooms.

The remainder of this page covers technical tips for navigating, viewing, and printing from this site.

Technical Tips for Navigating, Viewing, and Printing from this Site

Anytime you have an idea or comment, use the Quick Feedback feature at the bottom of every page on this site.

Two Navigation menus are located in the top-right corner of each page [only available on the web site]:

A bread crumb trail is located in the upper left of the screen, below our logo and just above the page title [only available on the web site]. Bread crumbs, which enable you to back up quickly through the levels of a site's hierarchy, are different than the "Back" button, which takes you back to the last page viewed.

The breadcrumbs look like this: Home >> Welcome Tips

For faster skimming and easier reading, you may want to adjust the width of your browser window to a narrower column-width. The text on this site runs across the full width of the screen. If you would prefer a narrower column-width, perform the following steps:

1. First, reduce the size of the browser window by clicking on the "Restore Down" button.
   [The "Restore Down" button is the "layered squares" button located at the very top right of your browser window - at the far top right of your screen - between the "Minimize" icon (the minus sign) and the "Close" icon (the "x").]
2. Then click and drag inwards either the left or right edge of the browser window.

The text will redraw to fit almost any width you desire, and as you link to other pages on this site, they too will automatically adjust to the width of your browser window. The only exceptions to this are those pages which contain images of scrolls. In the case of these pages, the text will still automatically adjust to the width of your browser window, but you will need to scroll from side to side to view any scroll images.

You may prefer that the text be smaller or larger than it now appears on your screen. Most browsers allow you to adjust text size using the "View" menu in the upper-left corner of your screen [only available on the web site]. This feature also effects printing (see the next point, below).

We have done our best to format all of our pages for easy printing. Unfortunately, different web browsers handle printing differently - and this invariably causes problems. Our hope is that such problems will be resolved with improvements to the CSS standard (see Open Standards).

That said, here are some of the printer-friendly features which we have built into this site:

(1) You can adjust the text size using the "View" menu in the upper-left corner of your screen. Shrinking the text size will enable you to fit more information on a single page; enlarging the text size will produce print-outs that are easier to read.

(2) If you are using a style-sheet saavy browser, such as Internet Explorer 6.x, Netscape 6.x. Opera 7.x, or Mozilla 1.2 (or any later version of these browsers) you will find that paper print-outs of pages from this site look different than what you see on the screen. Most notably, you won't see our navigation menus on your print-outs. We did this because such menus are only useful in the on-screen environment. We also think that blocking navigation menus from printing produces print-outs that look less cluttered and are easier to read.

(3) Where it makes sense to do so, links appearing in the text print with a full web address. For example, a link to our home page will look like this on screen:
home

but on paper, you will also see the full web address referenced by the link:
home [http://www.textmapping.org/index.html]

This enables you to see, on the printed page, a clear reference to where a link would take you on the web. We added this feature so that, for example, teachers at conferences who are given print-outs from this site (which we encourage) [see above] will know exactly where to look on the Web for information referenced on the print-outs. We hope you will find this useful.