[thelist] Info for High School Students

[McCreath_David]

Hi, Kathy --

I regularly conduct classes for teachers in my District. Although I've never
taught any to actual high-school students, I think these two would probably
go pretty well. (I'm a developer for the District, not an educator.)

Last weekend I taught two: 

Usability and Accessibility, which ended up being a crash course in CSS and
HTML 4 accessibility features, with two hands-on exercises in how to fix
your old PageMill/Homepage/Composer site.

You can find the outline and exercises here.

http://members.evolt.org/mccreath/au/

If you like the look of the exercises, let me know and I'll zip up the
resource material (the site that you rebuild) and send it to you off-list.

What you won't find is my personal lecture that leads up to the exercises
discussing all the finer points of the co-dependent bad coding spiral that
we're in between browsers and editing tools, the need for accessibility on
all web sites, but especially K12 sites, etc. You're on your own there. :)

I taught the whole class in a tight 3 hours (with a couple of five or ten
minute breaks). I don't know if you have that much time. I was also dealing
with people who had never contemplated the difference between "structure"
and "presentation", so that explanation and discussion took 15 minutes all
on its own.

One of the other points that I stressed in this class was the need for
having some familiarity with the code, so the entire class was conducted
using SimpleText and IE5/Mac. None of the 11 people in my class had ever
touched code before, but they walked out with a functional understanding of
CSS!

As for Dreamweaver, I've taught a couple of groups using the built-in
tutorial and it's pretty good except for these things:

1) It talks about making Flash text and Flash buttons, but doesn't really
discuss what happens when somebody visits your site without the plugin.

2) They have you insert a small block of text as an image that should really
be text.


3) They never discuss the 'alt' attribute for the images.

Those four issues can easily be handled with a short talk on accessibility
and why you shouldn't use Flash buttons and text, and why you should always
supply some sort of 'alt' attribute.

4) They use the font tag extensively.

That can be addressed with a short talk about how much easier it is to use
CSS, with the added benefit of increased accessiblity.

5) They get a little nuts with the "layout" table examples. They try to
illustrate every possible way of creating them, which is overwhelming to
someone who has never even tried to use tables as a layout tool to begin
with, much less Macromedia's idea of how to separate "layout" tables from
"real" (tabular data) tables.

You can ammeliorate a *little* bit of that confusion with a quick
explanation of tables as a layout tool, but I think it would be simpler just
to do a simpler example.

I'm working on my own Dreamweaver class that addresses all of this, but it's
at least a month away from completion, so if you want something besides the
built in, I can't help ya. :)

Let me know if you want the resources for the U&A class

David McCreath
ASD Web Development
http://www.asd.k12.ak.us/

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Kathy Stanley
>
>Hi David,
>
>They want hands on, but I also want to talk to them about the 
>aspects of web design you aren't going to find in the instruction 
>manual of a software program.
>
>They recently purchased Dreamweaver, and unfortunately the 
>teacher doesn't even have a clue how to use it.