Web design using Chromebooks

My current school is one to one for laptops and all the students are using Chromebooks. Creating, saving and displaying files on Chromebook was a small challenge since I had no prior experience with a Chromebook.

Obviously none of the suggested text editors (for Mac and Windows) suggested in Unit 3 will work.

Caret is a free, open source, plain text editor that is fully Chromebook compatible. It is available from the Chromebook store. It understands the syntax of more than 100 programming languages, one of which is html.

When editing an html file, it automatically adds ending tags and other required syntax elements. For example if you type opening quotes it will place the closing quotes after the cursor, after entering paragraph tag (or any other tag that has a corresponding closing tag), it automatically adds the ending tag.

After creating a basic html file it can be saved as an html file simply by giving it the .html or .htm extension. Students must save the file to the local storage (downloads folder is an easy choice). If they select the default location, My Drive (Google Drive) when they click on the saved file it will display as a text document and not as a web page. Once saved in this manner it can be opened in Chrome simply by clicking on the file from within the folder browser. It will then display as a tab in the Chrome browser.

Hope this helps.

Thank you for sharing what you’ve tried in your lab. It is especially nice that Caret is free and open source. I’m sure there are many teachers who appreciate the assistance.