We started the day with a daily puzzle. Students looked at a simple website and used "control + u" to reveal the html code. Then they read the comments within the code to answer the questions on the website. Some of them had trouble at first figuring out how the code links up with what they see on the screen, but they figured it out fairly quickly. Then we had a brief lesson about what html code is and how the internet works. We looked at today's To Do list and then took a brief break. (The Madison area High Schools are currently in basketball playoffs, so that was the topic of break time conversation in our room!)
As students worked on the To Do list, they started understanding both the code itself and how careful you have to be so that the code will actually work. Juan A. and Oscar had trouble at first because although they had the code right, they had it in the wrong order. They were putting a paragraph tag before every sentence and then not closing the paragraph tag. So, once they fixed that, they could see that it worked.
Many students finished the list quickly and they all seemed to be enjoying the activity. They were more than enthusiastic about it! Several of them wanted to learn right away how to add colors and font styles to the webpage they were creating. They asked the question and they did their own online research to find out how to do what they wanted to do. They even started linking videos to their page.
It was thrilling to teach them, to see them get excited about what they could do with code. Jose wanted to add more colors than basic red and blue, so he found a website that showed him the codes for a lot of colors. You should have seen these amazing students! They were moving to each other's computers to help each other, to show each other something new they had learned. The lab was full of a really awesome electric learning energy of enthusiasm! I heard one student say "Oh my gosh, this is cool!" when he opened his file with a web browser. The students went way beyond the To Do list. This was really the best ITA session I have seen and it was exactly what I always hope the students will do. Illa said, when he came back from break "This unit is the best one so far!".
Then we blogged and learned about the BTW for this unit.
AWESOME!!
Illa's HTML code and webpage
No comments:
Post a Comment