Seventh grade students were tasked to build web pages utilizing basic HTML via Notepad (hand coding), and then write "A Collection of Short-short Stories" ... one story per page and linked to the next ... to become sensitized to the programming language of HTML and improve their creative writing skills.

They utilized their web-page background images to help them think about and feel ... remember and dream ... their stories, similar to the Literacy Through Photography approach that utilizes pictures as prompts for writing. A collection of stories was targeted in keeping with the literary approach of the short story collection by a single author. The stories in a collection can share a theme, setting, or characters, and in this case, the shared items are the background images to help the students write.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup language for displaying web pages and other information that can be displayed in a web browser. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags enclosed in angle brackets ... < > ... within the web page content. As you read the students' short-short stories, go to view, and then down to source ... click to see their programming language that they had to learn in order to make the web pages possible.

Click on the screen captures below to take you to their collection of short-short stories (editing in progress on other collections of stories):