Digital Teacher Web Application is a package of multiple files that allows you to deploy your instructional or testing materials over the Web either on the Internet or a local intranet.
With the application running on the Web, your audience of students,
using an ordinalry web browser, can take lessons, training, or test from anywhere on
the globe as long as they are connected.
Your audience can use any kind of graphical web browsers compatible to Netscape 4 or above, or Internet Explorer 4 or above.
However, the browser should be Microsoft Windows-based. At this time, the Digital Teacher web application has not yet been tested on the browsers running on an Apple, IBM, Sun, or other non-Windows based systems.
The Digital Teacher web lesson is automatically generated by the Digital Teacher authoring program.
Then, the necessary files for your web lesson will automatically be created on your computer's hard disk.
In order for these files to be accessed by your audience, you must publish them on the Web. To publish on the Web simply means to upload files to your (or your Web hosting service provider's) web site. The Digital Teacher web application does not provide this uploading mechanism. But it can easily be accomplished using a file uploading program such as WS_FTP.
The Digital Teacher web lesson file can be generated either in the .HTM type or in the .ASP type.
Which file type you want to create your web lesson in will depend on which web server you intend to run the lesson on. In other words, it depends on the server type that is available to you on your web site.
In short,
It simply refers to a computer that provides web services on the Internet or on a local intranet. It serves your web pages to all the requesting clients (browsers). It can also refer to the software that manages and execute these activities. Here's an analogy.
So, in order to run web pages on the Web, you must be running a web server (a waiter).
From now, the term "web server" will be interchangeably used to refer to hardware or software. Also, when we say "your" web server, it can either be your organization's own server or that of your web hosting service provider.
The Digital Teacher web lesson can run on any kind of web server. No matter which server you have, your students can access and view your web lesson.
However, depending on the server, you are limited to run only one kind of your web lesson or both.
Deploying the .ASP type lesson enhances the lesson's functionality. This will be discussed in more details in Chapter 3: Generating Web Lesson Files.
In case you're not familiar with ASP, it stands for the Active Server Pages technology developed by Microsoft. An ASP file is just a web page that combines plain HTML and script languages into a single file. While a web page created in pure HTML displays static contents on the viewer's browser, the ASP page delivers dynamic contents.
For example, when your server serves a pure HTML file, it simply throws out the entire HTML contents to the client browsers. With ASP, however, the server scans the script codes inside the ASP file to determine what to send and what to not. Then, it sends out selectively chosen HTML portion of the page to the browser.
This way, you can provide your audience with information that can be tailored to meet specific needs. This means that your server (not the browser) must have the capability to interpret and execute ASP codes. That is, if you want to publish and administer your Digital Teacher web lesson in ASP, your web server must be an ASP-capable web server.
Unfortunately, not all web servers are capable of handling ASP.
At the time of this writing, either of the two web server software from Microsoft handles the job. This server software must also be running on a Microsoft Windows based server machine. (There are third-party companies whose software allows the Unix server to handle ASP, but we will not discuss them in this guide.)
Internet Information Server (IIS) comes with NT and 2000. If you are a corporate user, all you have to do is to ask your network administrator or the web master to see if IIS is available on your corporate network system. If you're an individual user and have a web site hosted by a service provider, ask your provider. If your provider's system is Unix based, you might want to switch to another host who runs NT.
Personal Web Server (PWS) is a compact version of IIS. It is available to download for free from the Microsoft web site. Details on where you can download it from and how to install it will be discussed in Chapter 12: Installing Microsoft PWS.
If you plan to deploy the Digital Teacher web lesson in the .HTM type only, you don't have to. But if you are going to deploy lessons in .ASP, you should although it is not required. (Remember? The IIS must still be available on your site to run ASP.)
You should probably want to install PWS on your local PC in order to preview your .ASP lesson before publishing it on your site. Since an ASP file can only be viewed on your browser by loading it from the web server, you cannot preview the .ASP type lesson without first installing and running an ASP-capable web server on your PC.
PWS fits nicely for this purpose. When you install PWS on your PC, the computer acts as a client and server. When you open your browser and load an ASP file while running PWS, the server executes and sends the ASP page to the browser so that it displays the page for you.
We will discuss on this topic in more details in Chapter 12: Installing Microsoft PWS.
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