Dreamweaver/Web Design Reflections.
It's been a while since I have sat down and actually written any notes or
reflections. I'm currently on a break from teaching and now seems to be a good
time to think about some of my recent teaching that has just come to an end.
I wonder how many times it's takes to do things where the teaching for it actually
work !!!! Last year the web design section of the course wasn't great, I didn't
feel happy with it. The problem was that first project was to advanced for
most students. (the project was the CSS Zen Garden). This year I did two projects
before the CSS project, one was simple task based and the other one as a simpler
CSS project.
Here is a few questions and notes about the approach I took this year.
- A lot of the projects/tasks are about redesign processes, which is something
that is not easy, but does reflect current industry work. Maybe redesign
processes could happen later.
- I personally have a huge amount of knowledge
about the area and I'm feeling it's a bit hard to understand the point
of view of a start learner at the start.
- Dreamweaver is a huge program,
to make things easier I've tried to cut down what the students needed to
do. Maybe what they lacking is an overview of the application.
- I've been
avoiding hand coding, but maybe that is the basics that the students are
missing.
- For the people that where having problems the step by step demonstrations
and handouts where useful. But I think only 20% of students used the handouts.
One of the problems with Dreamweaver is that there is many ways to do things.
- The application is not truly what you see is what you get. This is an important
thing for students to learn, but is frustrating. (Maybe this needs to be
made into an competition, eg biggest stuff up).
- I'm tempted to break it
down into small tasks, but I don't want to break it up to much.
Maybe the task sequence could be
- Making a new page design via hand coding (with step by step supports)
Make this nice and quick.
- Fixing up mistakes in some existing pages.
- An overview of what Dreamweaver
can do (maybe this could done as small research projects by the students)
- A series of small jacks tasks on CSS design techniques and other HTML techniques
(with step by step supports). I'm moving towards making these in mini technical
problems.
- A case study on web site development processes. What do this
students do ?
- A project to make a simple new site (only give the students
a short amount of time and make it simple)
- Project to redesign webCT stylesheet's
- Project to redesign Zen Garden
- Bush Foods Project, or a real project
Which means putting more learning tasks in before the projects, and might
mean removing the webCT stylesheet project.
I have to remember that a large part of what students want from f2f courses
is the social aspects, but I do find it difficult that when students are having
problems if they go off and find other resources then normally it all becomes
clear to them.
I should also add the many of students have been having trouble balancing work loads at TAFE and part-time jobs.
Posted by robin at September 9, 2005 03:44 PM