U3 Day 5: PD Discussion Topic

How do you plan teach this lesson?

We/they just played around. They wanted to do something, learned how to do it using W3School’s tutorials and then learned how to alter the code until they got what they wanted…using the problem solving approach acquired in Unit 2.

How much time do you plan spending on these tags?

We spent a day or two learning how to use them then applied that knowledge for the rest of Unit 3

Were there any great ideas from summer pd that you remember and are going to implement?

We built our webpages within Neocities.org.

I plan on having my students practice by having them use various tags for web pages on topics that they are interested in. This way they can design the pages the way they want and make and see modifications that make sense to them.

I had my students create a document with a list of tags from the previous lesson and added the others. I also challenged them to look up information on W3Schools to find similar tags for emphasizing text. They were able to find the tag for bold and italic and try them out on their webpage.

I will continue with the lesson where students created web pages based on a book they have read. I will require them to use the “strong” and “em” tags in their documents.

My students picked up HTML so quickly I taught this lesson in conjunction with the intro lesson. It was fairly easy. The students were immediately asking questions. They wanted to do colors and pictures too right away!

I don’t plan on spending single days over a few simple tags. Having taught this course numerous times, I plan on teaching the gist of HTML and CSS within 2-3 days max and then turning them loose on tutorials and incorporating other techniques like storyboarding, accessibility, user needs, etc. I personally think the way this lesson is designed is outright weird.

I would teach these tags as a continuation as others have said. Using a guided practice website we can experiment with different tags and then they can use what they learn on their independent sites that they choose to create. I am thinking it would take 2-3 days practicing and playing because a lot of the true learning will be during the creation of their independent sites.

For my kids the strong and em tags were introduced as part of the rubric for a project. They were tasked with search for the tags and implementing them correctly within their project. By making them responsible for their own learning, I have found that they are more diligent workers.

I encouraged my students to explore additional tags. They kept a list of tags that they had learned and their effecs. They also completed brief “exploration records” for me for accountability. This helped with differentiation.