[thelist] Info for High School Students

McCreath_David McCreath_David at xmail.asd.k12.ak.us
Wed Apr 11 16:00:35 CDT 2001


Hi, Marc -

>In my cynical fashion, I plan to start my first class with a couple 
>software boxes on the desk. Frontpage, Dreamweaver, the like. My first 
>words, "So you want to learn to develop websites? This is how you get 
>started..." *drop both boxes into the trashcan*

In my experience, that's the best possible way to suck the fun right out of
the room and alienate about half your audience.

I start my classes with a discussion of why it's important to understand the
code, then build a "Hello, World." page in a text editor to demystify the
code. If you're teaching a class to people who just want to play around on
the web and have some fun or who have been press-ganged into creating a site
for an organization or business, telling them that all the visual tools out
there are useless and they're going to have to code by hand is only going to
be discouraging.

I find it much more empowering and enlightening for the audience to
understand 1) that there are standards, 2) that the standards exist for good
reasons, 3) that the editor and browser manufacturers have a history of
messing up or ignoring some standards, and that 4) they (your students) need
to be aware of some issues, should they choose to use a visual editor.

my 2 cents
David




More information about the thelist mailing list