Making The Most Out Of TPJC.NET

Written by Koh Han Jie (07S22).

TPJC.NET is the most visited website in my browser, 2nd only to google.com which happens to be my homepage.

Features
TPJC.NET is the best online school's portal I have ever seen. There, you can share your pictures by uploading them in PhotoShare. You can try all means to push your picture into the Hottest list, consisting of the top 20 most viewed pictures ranked by the number of views in the past 7 days. Who knows if you are lucky, your pictures may end up in the All-time Popular list!

There is an online messaging system where you can send online messages (in a similar fashion to e-mails) to other students, ex-students or tutors from the college. Students can also attach files in their online messages. For convenience, you can also create groups (such as one for your CCA) so that you can skip all the hard work trying to select your intended recipients from all the classes listed.

And then you have the Forum. You can air your views on any topic by simply creating a thread. It's classified according to various categories such as Leisure, Academic and Co-Curricular (one warning I can give to you is that, please post relevantly as sometimes your post may get 'reported' if it is deemed irrelevant by other forum users. As a consequence, the post may not be shown.). The Forum also allows the various clubs and societies to share news and updates as well as passing down important information to its members via their threads. There is also private class forums where only users from the civics group can access.

There is a section called Ask a Question where you can post your queries on any subject and the relevant tutors (or sometimes even students) will take the time to answer your queries, be it academic or non-academic. The service is similar to Yahoo! Answers, except that it is only open to TPJCians.

There are also selected articles posted to encourage the students to read up on the current affairs. These articles end up in the Recommended Story section. The articles are usually taken from useful sources such as TIME and BBC. Each article is cleverly selected so that students can use them in their assignments, particularly when it comes to General Paper.

There is of course the Announcement section where you can see all the announcements for the various areas such as subjects and CCAs. Nevertheless, you can choose to block announcements from the various areas by using the filter function available. With this nifty function, only the announcements that are relevant to you are made visible once you sign in.

There are also various study resources like the popular Physics' Keep In Touch. A Hall of Fame application is even installed to rank the students by the scores they accumulated from completing the questions, which are divided into 3 levels of difficulties for students targeting different grades.

Boring? Don't fret. There is a Premier League Challenge game where users are each given 100 points to bet on the matches. No money involved as the total points earned or lost is recorded as your score. It is described as a game of mathematics and judgment, risk vs reward, learning and fun.

Controversy
Tutors also used to upload past lecture slides and tutorial answers as well as past preliminary examination papers from schools all over Singapore with an aim to provide the JC2 students with ample practice papers before their 'A' level examinations. Nonetheless, all of them had been moved to another recognized yet user-unfriendly learning portal, known as AskNLearn. The move caused a huge outburst in the student body as most of us still preferred TPJC.NET as it is more user-friendly and has a better interface. It was widely debated in the forums with many students expressing their anger and disappointment on the school administration about the move. To many the incident is still fresh in their minds(including myself).

Tips And Tricks
Here are some really fun tips and tricks that you can try with TPJC.NET:

1) I like to move it, move it! We like to...MOVE IT!
Select the entire URL and replace it with this code:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName('img'); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+'px'; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+'px'}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

After pasting the entire code, press ENTER. All the images uploaded in or hosted by our student portal will start to move! Try it with PhotoShare if you wish to. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like:

































2) Make it work in FireFox!
One of the critical problems with our student portal is its inability to work with a a FireFox browser. Some of the features such as the Ask A Question service is compatible only with Internet Explorer. This has left some users unhappy, especially those who have installed the cool features that FireFox has to offer.

Well, good news for you! There is a add-on which embeds Internet Explorer in tabs of FireFox. You may click HERE for more details. Now we can maximize our usage of TPJC.NET while enjoying the other features installed in our FireFox browser!

Conclusion
Last but not least, the great thing about TPJC.NET is that ex-students, like myself, are still allowed and able to access all areas of the portal. For example the Forum, PhotoShare and the online messaging system, enable us to keep updated with the happenings of our Alma Mater and keep in touch with our old classmates, years or even decades after our graduation.

TPJC.NET FTW!