Web Design Resource
A Beginner's Guide to Building Web Sites. Print and PDF versions available from User Friendly Resources.
Education
Teaching is a fairly insane way to spend the day and by the middle of the year it is easy to lose sight of goals and lose direction. News From the Front is intended to be a place for me to store experiences in the classroom, ideas for improving my own teaching and documentation of pilots and projects I am running alongside my teaching. The Wishlist is intended for myself and organisations supporting education, in particular those supporting classroom teachers and will likely focus on issues that need resolving, the sorts of systems we need and hopefully provide a glimpse into what it is like in a classroom for those who do not work in one.
News From the Front
Web Design for Beginners
While teaching IT across Year 10 - 13 I built up some resources around web design to help explain the basics and let students build skills to the point they could create their own web site with a decent visual style. I taught them to adhere to the W3C specs (web standards) right from the start and aimed to keep things as simple and uniform for myself throughout the different age groups.
Year 10s typed in the XHTML and CSS and used the existing images to make a snazzy little site. The focus was on understanding the idea of structured content, separating visual style and the really switched on kids could grab the Gimp concept and tweak the images. Time was the biggest constraint with this age group.
Year 11s could be stepped up a notch as they were ready. Not all my students had done the Year 10 course so the scaffolding was important. They still typed in the XHTML and CSS but were expected to use the concept as a base to build their own visual style (keeping the same basic layout).
Year 12s worked through the basic template and students who had completed Yr10 and 11 with me were introduced to more complex layout techniques (not covered in this resource ... next one maybe). They built visual styles from scratch and were required to get the concept approved before moving forward. Testing and validation became more important and a key criteria for the assessment.
Year 13s who had been through all the previous years were beyond this resource but, again, some of the students were new to the course. Extensions were about more complex techiques and an introduction to content management systems. Validation and quality assurance testing were assumed to be basic skills and students were expected to set up and document the testing. Visual styles were expected to be built from scratch and a level of complexity and skill were expected.
This book is the tidied up verson of the various resources I used in class and while it arrived a bit late for my teaching I hope it is of value to other teachers who need something solid to introduce web design to students. The resource comes with a layered concept made in the open source image manipulation tool Gimp and the files for the final web site.
It has been published by User Friendly Resources and is available through their web site in hardcopy or PDF formats.
Wishlist
Student Management System
Concept 1In reaction to our school's choice of Student Management System I started knocking up ideas for interfaces that would allow teachers to see the sorts of information they needed in class. The idea is to hide as much of the functionality as possible and make the interface contextual. Ideally this would then feed information back to a Government approved system.
I see it as being open source. Schools have enough financial issues without adding more to the mix.
This is the first screen a teacher should see when they hit a classroom:
- the current attendance for the class - defaults to attending so the teacher can set the few students to absent.
- links to class lists which would give individual student info
- Reports for attendance allowing the teacher quick access to a full record for students, Reports so a teacher can add behavioural and learning information on the fly, Tutor Group so the teacher can access info about specific students in their pastoral care.
- Alerts: any information for students related to the teacher (tutor group, class etc) - showing stand-downs, sickness etc.
Outline
I also feel that a lot of the SMSs seem to be making things more complex than they need to be. My feeling is that there are a limited number of elements in a school - things like Students, Resources, Courses (and related things like assessment) - and then a set of relationships between those things. The relationships are where things get complex and are different between schools (but only in terms of focus). With this in mind I started outlining the basics of what I see a SMS needing to include: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhnqpzbr_2dmj3rcc3