If your
question is not listed, please
contact us for personalized assistance.
If you forget your
password, you can request that it be sent to you. You will just
need to provide us with the email address that you used to register
with in TrackStar. Proceed
to the password request page.
If you can't remember
the e-mail address you registered with, you no longer have access
to that e-mail account, or you do not get an automated response
in two working days, please contact
us directly. Be sure to give us as much information as possible
to identify yourself and your account.
It is easy to update
your personal information for TrackStar. First, login as usual
by clicking on the Login to Make or Edit a Track link on
the TrackStar home page or at the top of any other page. This
brings you to the login page. Log in with your email address and
password. On your TrackStar My Account page there
is an area titled Account Information, as shown in the
image below. Click on the Edit link. When you are finished
editing your information, please click on the Update button.
If you have received
email verification from us that you are using the correct password
and you are still having trouble logging in then there are a few
things that you should check. If you think you may have inadvertently
made two or more user accounts, we can consolidate these for you,
just contact us. If
you are positive that you haven't created more than one account,
be sure that you are entering all your information in the appropriate
type of letters, meaning that if you registered with all lowercase
letters or all uppercase letters you must enter them in the same
manner. Also, check to see if your Caps Lock is accidentally on.
The next thing you should check is that you are logging in at
TrackStar's home page http://trackstar.4teachers.org.
Trying to login through other web sites such as BlackBoard.com
does not work. If you are still having trouble logging in after
you have followed all of these directions, then you may need to
check to see if your browser is set to accept cookies.
All Tracks are personally
reviewed to assure appropriate content and accordance with copyright
law. When a Track does not meet our guidelines, our Track reviewers
put the Track on hold until the Track is edited and approved.
Learn what material is appropriate.
As part of saving
your new Track or changes to an existing Track, all of the links
will be checked to see if the site they reference is accessible.
If there are problems, you will be returned to the create or
edit page, and an error messages will describe the problems for you. There
are two common causes for links that don't work.
The first common cause are slight typos, such
as capital letters instead of lowercase, will cause a link to
fail. Often, users may mistype an address, or leave a letter
off the end. A common mistake is mistyping the .htm or
.html extension of many addresses, or putting a space in the URL. Please type exactly
what appears in the URL, and double-check for accuracy. To avoid
typos, cut and paste URLs directly from the browser or word processing
document into the TrackStar form.
Many sites move, changing
their URLs, or are deleted by their Webmasters. Check a Track
before using it with a class. You will be notified via e-mail
if the TrackStar system detects more than 2 broken links in your
Tracks. To find out whether a link has moved or disappeared, try
to use indices on the link's main site, or the search engine you
originally used to find the site. Workshop leaders can teach other
ways to analyze and repair broken URLs.
You haven't lost your
Track; the link has simply jumped out of TrackStar's frames or
created a new window. Sometimes, site authors do not want their
site to be viewed in frames, so they take steps to prevent it.
If this occurs, use your browser's back button or history feature
to return to TrackStar. If your browser's back button is disabled,
this probably means the current page was opened in a new window.
Simply close the new window, and your Track will appear! If you
find that one of your links does this, we recommend that you edit
your Track and use a similar site instead, or place this link
at the end of your Track, where the new window may be less disorienting
to your students.
Please visit the Editing
section of our online tutorial to help you get started in
the editing process.
To delete a Track,
log in as usual. On the My Account page, click on the Manage
My Tracks button. Your Tracks will be listed as seen
in the figure below. To delete a Track, click on the Delete
link which is the red x on the left-hand side. Make sure you are
on the correct line if you have multiple Tracks.
A confirmation pop-up
window will appear, asking if you are sure you want to delete
this Track. It looks something like the image below, depending
on your browser. You can still cancel at this point. Click OK
to permanently delete the Track.
If it's been more
than 30 days since you deleted your Track, then you will not be
able to recover it.
If it's been less
than 30 days since you deleted your Track and you have the deleted
Track's number you can recover your deleted Track yourself. Login
to your account. Then proceed to the TrackStar home page. On the
home page in the Find A Track, section as shown in the
image below, enter your deleted Track's number in the input box
next to View Track # and press the Go button.
You will see a page
like the one in the image below stating that the Track has been
deleted . Click on the link Recover Track.
You will then get confirmation
that your Track has been recovered. Only Tracks deleted by you
can be recovered in this way. If a Track was deleted by the TrackStar
Administration, then only the Administrators can recover it.
Educational Value:
Material must be pertinent to a K-12 public or private school
curriculum in the United States. Text, audio, or graphics that
are not appropriate for this audience may not be presented in
TrackStar.
Images, Sounds,
and Language: When including links to music, movie, art, health,
biology pages, or other sites with potentially graphic audio,
visual, or grammatical material, please carefully surf the entire
site and all of its links first, to insure that young viewers
do not stumble upon inappropriate material.
U.S. Copyright
Law: TrackStar is designed to help students explore a variety
of sites related to a topic. 4Teachers does not support breaking
apart a single site and placing its separate pages in a Track.
It is better to link to the site once, and use the annotation
to direct students to different parts of the site. Tracks with
2 to 5 links can have no more than 2 links to the same site. Tracks
with 6 to 15 links can have no more than 3 links to the same site.
We provide these rough guidelines because of the continued ambiguity
of US copyright law concerning the Internet. Use your best judgment,
and know that we will hold Tracks that have questionable copyright
infringements. We notify you of your Track's status. This is for
your legal protection as well as ours. While a Track is on hold,
only the author can view it.
Number of Links:
TrackStar does not allow one link Tracks, because if you want
to have your students visit one site then it is easier for you
to just bookmark that one site. If you try to Save
a Track with only one link you will receive an error message.
Use of Search Engines:
Please don't link to search engines or search engine result pages.
Rather, link to specific sites found while searching the Internet.
One exception: if users create a Track about how to find high-quality
Internet resources, links to search engines may be appropriate.
If you do link to search engines, be certain that the engines
are kid-safe and family-friendly. TrackStar now accepts links
to Yahooligans!,
Google and Ask for
Kids.
E-mail links:
We do not accept the inclusion of e-mail links or solicitations
within Track descriptions or annotations -- such as, "Mail
me and tell me what you think of this site." We
do this so that students are not encouraged to write to strangers
on the Internet.
Using the annotation
editor:
You can format your text using the toolbar buttons - just like you
do in a word processor.
|
change
the font and size of your text |
|
make
your text bold, italic or underlined |
|
center,
left or right justify your paragraphs |
|
use
numbered or bulleted lists |
We encourage TrackStar
users to use HTML that assists students in reading annotations,
such as <BR> tags, list tags such as <OL>, <UL>,
and <LI>, or other common formatting tags. We do not allow
users to include images, sounds, or video HTML links in Track
annotations, as their inclusion considerably slows the loading-time
of Tracks. Additionally, please refrain from using HTML in TrackStar
that changes the overall look of the Track format.
TrackStar reserves
the right to make edits to any Track over a year old, in order
to maintain link functionality. We may make such changes to your
old Track if we have featured it elsewhere on our site, such as
in Top
Tracks, or as a featured Track on our Professional Development
pages.
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