HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a format that tells a computer how to display a web page. The documents themselves are plain text files (ASCII) with special "tags" or codes that a web browser knows how to interpret and display on your screen. These documents may be written using any text editor, or more sophisticated software tools that do the html for you.
Although there are many html editors available, Microsoft Word is probably the simplest to use and most familiar to most of you and is perfectly adequate for this class. From Microsoft Word create a document as you would normally. Then when you are ready to publish it save as type web page. Then copy the file and associated folder (i.e. **.htm and **_files) to your file server web folder.
The references below give a bit more information about writing web pages and html. Sometimes, even when using a program like Microsoft Word that takes care of most of the formatting, it is useful to have a basic grounding in what html looks like and how html tags work.
After preparing your documents it is Very Important to check that they are viewable correctly from a Browser. Where possible get a friend to check that they can view them to make sure that you are not pointing to something that only you have access to. Sometimes the protection settings on documents get set so that they are not viewable by others. If this occurs right click on the file and adjust the security properties so that they are readable by everyone.
Each document (apart from the powerpoint presentation) should be prepared as a single html file. There may (and almost always should) be embedded graphics or images, but a single print command should result in the entire paper being printed. These documents may have links to reference material (e.g. data or sources that you used), but should be printable and self standing, in the sense that a printout tells the complete story without requiring reference to the linked material. For the term paper you may include a table of contents at the beginning, but please do not make each section a separate page that requires clicking to go to it. Please also embed graphics in preference to requiring the user to click to access them.