WEBBER DAY FOUR

The Web Unit Day 4 saw an unprecedented level of confusion... And thus LEARNING! No, in actuality students did make their grievances known. They were tired of feeling like they didn't know what they were doing, and we tried to argue that's how they're supposed to feel. (To a degree...)

Let's look at what happened:

First, Kevin led the class in a recreation of a professor's site:



The basics of setting up a site in Dreamweaver, using its interface for all sorts of regular HTML tasks: making links, lists, linking style sheets, and so on.

The students then broke the usual haze of Education section by fireing up Dreamweaver and following the steps Kevin went through. They also had access to a step by step set of instructions on a Google doc, that had one crucial error: the steps didn't have numbers! They were in paragraphs!

Tony and Kevin went around reading aloud the instructions whenever students had trouble, or clarified what they meant.

After the Education Section, students entered the full fledged Exploration section, doing the same thing. Kevin would demo in front of the class how to do something (say, add a CSS rule to a div's id), and then students would have at it themselves, using the hard to read directions. A cadre of talented students, Oscar, Besma, Natalia included, managed to come near finished!

Oscar's site:



Finally, students got back to work on their parody site. Not a crazy amount of progress is being made, but definitely some. Shrek had a funny edit of Illa, and a number of students were taking their photos with cameriod.com!

February 20: Catching the Dream with Dreamweaver

We all woke up to see fresh snow on the ground, and even though we were sleepy we came to ITA with a spring in our steps (even if it isn't quite yet spring outside).

The first thing we did was to look at how to link CSS sheets and how to build them in Dreamweaver. Eliza did the demo while Felipe described what she was doing. It gets a bit complicated to use CSS, but the results are pretty cool because it affects the entire site all at once so that you don't have to type in the styles for every single page. We can't wait to start really building our own pages!

Felipe then did a walk through of in-line coding and how to change it to CSS coding. It seems complicated, but maybe after building a CSS sheet today, students will be able to do it next time.

After a well-deserved and much-needed break, the fantabulous students began following the steps in the worksheet to make their own version of a website about Professors Against Bad Romance Novels (bad romance novels are just, well, bad!). Students were engaged in the process, but found it difficult from the get-go. The first problem is that the network is accursedly slow, so downloading the necessary folders from the network drive wasted time. Perhaps in the future we might do something similar to what STS does and make several jump drives from which the students can copy files? The second difficult part was that Windows 7 doesn't want to interface properly with Dreamweaver CS3, so each little step of defining the site was difficult for students. Once they got that done though, they started making quick progress through the steps. Although this activity was very challenging, the students stuck with it, but it was hard enough that they didn't have time to do all of it in the 50 minutes before break.

After our second break, Felipe instructed students to save a screen shot of their work on the webpage and upload it to blogger, then join their BTW teams to keep working in their projects. It was a good idea to upload their screen shots before working with their teams because they probably won't be at the same computer later, but they will be able to access their blogger site from anywhere and continue to work on their blogs. Way to go!

Then students broke up in to their groups to work on their projects. The were working with a lot of focus and making progress. Illa was working on cropping a photo of Remi to put on their site, Stephanie was writing the copy for hers and Jacob's site, and Aneda was also working on writing for her group's spoof of Rush Hour. I totally can't wait to see what they come up with!

For the last few minutes, everybody blogged and the day was wondrously successful!

Web Unit Day 3

The class commenced with an interactive demonstration of how to define a site. Clara volunteered to come up to the front of the class and explain how to set up a site and index folder for use in Dreamweaver using physical folders.

Kevin then led the students through the Dreamweaver Lesson. He quickly made a 4-page website for the IAPABRN (International Association of Professors Against Bad Romance Novels). Oscar was amazed at how quickly somebody can make a functioning website. Kevin introduced the Daily Puzzle which didn't puzzle Oscar and Sophia.

After break, the Exploration Section came in with full force! The students started working on making the "Cloud, Sky, Ground" website. The directions weren't the best.... so students had to do some learning on the fly. The adventure list was far too ambitious, and most students didn't get far at all, except for Oscar, who finished the entire activity!

For certification, students began gathering images for their parody websites. Most seemed to enjoy imagining themselves as gorgeous, photoshopped movie stars. Finally, students blogged about

Ultimately, the day scored a 6 on the productivity scale, and a 9 on the fun scale, with the former being caused by the instructors, and the latter by the students.

Weaving Dreams

Eliza led our first activity, which was a short lesson on correctly setting up folders on the computer. She used real-life folders to demonstrate. There was one folder labeled "Think like a computer". Inside that folder was one called "index.html". The index folder held a piece of paper that looked like a website might look, but with spaces for the images. In the spaces for the images, there were post-it notes that read "show jellyfish.jpg in images folder" and "show babyclown.jpg". There was a second file folder inside the main one that was labeled "images" and in that folder was a photo of a jellyfish. Illa came to the front of the room and showed the class what was in the folders and how easy it was to locate the jellyfish picture, but it was impossible to find the baby clown picture. The idea was that if we don't tell the computer where to find the images, then it won't be able to display them on the screen.

Then we did the daily puzzle. Today's puzzle was called "scour the code" because the goal was to look carefully at the code and repair it. Collin was the first to figure the puzzle out . . . answer: none of the tags had been closed!

The next activity went very well. Eliza demonstrated on the computer while Felipe explained what she was doing. We learned how to use the design view in Dreamweaver to set up div tags and to change styles from paragraphs to headings. We also learned how to make an internal link and how to add images to the design.

Felipe then explained today's "adventure list" and we took a break.

Today's "adventure list" was very challenging. Most students seemed to have a difficult time completing all the tasks. They seemed to have a hard time making the size for the div tags, which required them to use css, and then making a list, which required them to make a nested list. Eventually Felipe did a few more brief demonstrations which answered some of the overall questions and then students were able to keep working. David was able to get his done and then it seemed like a few other students started to understand better and finish theirs.

After another short break, we began working on our BTW. Each group has chosen a trilogy to make a website about. For each website there are three roles: 1. coder, 2. image master, 3. text writer and editor. Each student will do part of the work for the overall website. Eliza showed Stephanie, Jacob and Marcy how to make a drop box folder so they could collaborate on their files and work on them at home.