Week 9: Lessons Learned

My project website is here.

I considered the Web to be a useful tool for teaching before I took this course, and my opinion has changed only in that I have found a number of additional ways to make it useful.
1) I will probably try to put together a course syllabus for each of my classes that I teach and put them on-line.
2) I also plan to include reference links to the files that students need to use and to extra reference material.
3) As a rule, high school students really like to blog. Unfortunately, my school systems' networks have horribly limited access to the outside world, deliberately imposed and controlled yb our ISP. So I don't see myself incorporating anything there...

As for what others think, see Todd's site and Danny's site.

Week 8: Learning through doing

At this point, I am convinced that there is no HTML editor out there that gets it right all of the time. I agree that What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWIG) editors such as MS Front Page and Macromedia Dreamweaver allow you to create a lot more code more efficiently that you would be able to do if you were just hand-coding. BUT - the cose they create isn't always correct or the most efficient code possible.

The most common place where I find that HTML generaters fail is in the creation of links. I usually want to use a relative link - something like "myfile.html" - which means that the file targeted by a link set up that way will simply look in the same directory as the file containing the link. HTML editors frequently use absolute links - such as "/websitecode/thissite/myfile.html". This becomes a problem when you relocate the code - you have to go into the code and change all of the absolute links.

The tables created by HTML generators are frequently a bit more complex than they really need to be.

Also, style elements are usally coded "in-line" by code gemerators, rather than using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to easily provide a consistant easily-modifiable style for the entire site.

The moral of the story is TEST TEST TEST - try out the code on your development system, then try it out again on the sserver where it will be permanently hosted. Be ready to re-code some code sections by hand if necessary to produce more effective code.

Week 7: Video

I like movies, and consider it handy to be able to see the trailers of films that I am thinking about seeing before I actually go to the theater. For this reason, I like Yahoo's movie preview section.

Apple Computer puts its TV ads on their web site, thus allowing them to do double duty as Internet content and TV ad. They are acctually pretty informative and funny. I love the way their computer ads slam Microsoft - like the best satire, they aare deadly accurate in revealing the weakness of PC spoducts compared to the Macintish.

The Microsoft Network (MSN) also makes effective uses of video - their "video headlines" on the main page of their site encourage the user to browse and stay on site - a prime goal for any commercial site.

Week 6:Podcaster

I looked at some podcasting sites, but I don't think I successfully subscribed to anything.

Week 5: Delicious

I found del.icio.us and set up an account. I located several good professional links and put them into it. See below for a link.