Day Numero 6 in B109

Hi,

Today we had a blast. First, and most of the day, we went to an online copy of the inline to external activity. Downloading it to our computers and then making that into a website, complete with images, took QUITE a bit of time.

But we did it, and it was awesome. Next, we started moving inline styles to external styles. It took quite a bit of remembering, to the point of the instructor having to go up and do the activity he demoed the past two sessions again, but we learned it. More or less.

All that business ended up taking up both the Education and Exploration sections. And, as always, students had to teach each other in order to survive the harsh climate of B109.

The last period, A.J. came in and had the students do a survey. Then, they cheerfully took a permit test, and finally, they bloggered.

Oh, speaking of A.J., that reminds me: the other classroom, B to the two 07, did A.J.'s assessment, whereas here in ol' B109, we just worked on the Inline to External activity. So next time, we're ready for the Assessment!

Adios ~

Fantastically Positioned Pages - Day 5 of WEB U

Our day blasted off with a demonstration of how positioning in CSS works. Students learned about static positioning ("browser default!" later exclaimed a student's blog), relative, absolute, and fixed. Oscar took it outside the classroom and pointed out how MySpace uses fixed positioning to keep elements of their site in the same place.



After the demonstration, students drilled down on details by following a worksheet of the same activity.

A good hour into the morning we all went upstairs for a meeting about rules. That prompted a discussion of servers upon our return. Students re-learned how special software turns a regular computer into a server, and Kevin displayed some code he wrote for a class that does just that.

The next 20 minutes or so was a lesson using Felipe's excellent website-cum-activity, inline to external styles. Kevin presented a fictitious future for the students, in which they are professional web designers asked to change the background on 500 web pages for a single website! Using inline styles, this task would take ages. With external styles, however, it takes deleting and adding one word.

For the final stretch, students worked on their BTWs. Kevin was accused of giving students' computers' viruses when the site he suggested, cameriod, wasn't working. At the end of another frantic, exciting day, groups made true progress on their BTWs, and upped their CSS wizardry skills.

Inline/External Style Sheets/Positioning, a collection of awesome stuff to learn

 

Just like this cool computer dude from : http://media.merchantcircle.com, we looked closely today----we looked closely at coding for positioning and at replacing inline styles with external style sheets.

We started off right away with a step-by-step activity on positioning in CSS. Our .html file created 4 colored boxes on the display. We changed the codes for the position of the boxes on the screen then watched how our changes affected the display.We learned that we can set the position as "relative" to the objects above and below, or that we can make it be "fixed" so that it stays at the same place on the screen. We also learned that if we don't tell the browser to set "margin: 0" that it will automatically create a white margin space around whatever we want it to display.

Then we had a meeting with all of ITA to talk about new rules regarding movement between rooms and leaving the building by 4:15 PM.

After the meeting, we began working on creating external style sheets to replace inline display of styles. This activity was challenging for many of the students, although Juan M., Juan A., DJ and Aubrey seemed to catch on fairly quickly.

We were relieved to take a brief break and then everyone got into BTW groups to work on organizing the files in the network drive. Students also took a few minutes to blog.

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.