web-education Archives - Page 58 of 71

Review: Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

Summary: a complete course

Sep 5, 2007 by

Web Teacher

product

The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

★★★★★ The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP by David Powers is from Friends of ED (2007). The book is a replacement for Powers’ earlier book, Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8, but largely revised, rewritten, and with new chapters. The new Spry widgets in CS3 are covered in several chapters.

I very much like the approach taken to most topics in this book. The author takes a look at the underlying XHTML, talks about how to keep things accessible, and warns you when things are not best practice, or still in development (as a number of the Spry widgets are) or just plain a bad idea.

As you could gather from the title, there is more to this book than just a run through the ways you use Dreamweaver to put text on a page. You find out how to set up for PHP, how to install a MySQL database, and how to use phpMyAdmin.

In the CSS chapter, Powers supports concepts I’ve preached for quite some time, such as to stay away from the Property inspector for fonts. There is a whole chapter on modifiying one of the built-in CSS layouts that are included in Dreamweaver CS3.

There are several chapters dealing with data, data tables, data access, searching data.

This is a very complete, helpful book to anyone who wants to learn more about Dreamweaver CS3 and use it to maintain dynamic, database driven sites. It is not for the complete novice with Dreamweaver.

If I were teaching a Dreamweaver course on a level that included working with databases, I would be quite happy to use this book. It’s thorough, it supports standards and best practices, and it’s clearly written.

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Technorati Tags: Book Review, Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

National School Boards reports on social networking

The National School Boards Associaton just published a study called CREATING & CONNECTING//Research and Guidelines on Online Social—and Educational—Networking as a PDF file.

The study was comprised of three surveys: an online survey of 1,277 nine- to 17-year-old students, an online survey of 1,039 parents and telephone interviews with 250 school district leaders who make decisions on Internet policy.

According the the NSBA Media Advisory on the report, these are the key findings:

96 percent of students with online access use social networking technologies, such as chatting, text messaging, blogging, and visiting online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Webkinz. Further, students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education.
Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers and 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork.
Students report spending almost as much time using social network services and Web sites as they spend watching television. Among teens who use social networking sites, that amounts to about 9 hours a week online, compared to 10 hours a week watching television.
96 percent of school districts say that at least some of their teachers assign homework requiring Internet use.

With almost 100% of today’s students reporting that they use online technology such as social networking, chatting, texting, and blogging the NSBA has some observations and recommendations for education and educators.

Technorati Tags: Social Media, Creating and Connecting, Education

U of Maine’s journey toward 508 compliance

Read Alan Parks’ article Focus On Higher Education – Best Practices: Compliance in EDTECH magazine to see how the University of Maine worked its way to having every web site at the universtity meet federal accessibility guidelines.

Ten Checkpoints of a Web Standards Based Curriculum

I just accepted an invitation to present at HIghEdWebDev2007 on “Ten Checkpoints of a Web Standards Based Curriculum.” I’d love to hear from teachers in the field as to what they consider the two most important aspects of a standards based curriculum for HTML, Dreamweaver, JavaScript and Flash. In my mind, best practices and accessibility fit into this topic, so if you want to give me your top two with that in mind, I’d be happy to learn what you think.

Technorati Tags: HighEdWebDev2007

Molly’s offering free training

Amazing opportunity for educators from Molly. Wow. molly.com: Train the Trainer Program

Here’s the deal: You demonstrate to me that you will take your knowledge forward to other educators, students, trainers and evangelists who can and will talk to their students and/or companies about standards.This is a MUST. I only will train people for FREE who can prove they are in education, technology training, or work with a company where they can provide in-depth training for their teams.

Act fast, Molly’s very much in demand.

Latest working draft of WCAG 2.0

On May 17, 2007, the W3C published the latest version of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Changes have been incorporated because of the criticism the first working draft received. There’s a very helpful review of the changes at The Web Standards Project that might give you a quicker summary of what’s new than reading the entire W3C document. The latest working draft was released before the WCAG Samurai came out with their “errata” earlier this week.

Review: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

Jun 9, 2007 by

Web Teacher

Summary: CSS for design

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

★★★★☆ This book by Jason Beaird (Sitepoint, 2007) discusses some of the principles of design and explains how to implement those principles using CSS.

It covers some of the same ground as the popular design for non-designers books by Robin Williams, but takes on new topics. And explains how to write the HTML and CSS to make it happen. It even includes some hints for chores in Photoshop. The book has chapters on layout and composition, color, texture, typography and imagery.

As for using it to teach, the book could not stand alone as a semester’s core for a design course. However, it would be a good resource in a general web design class. It’s a slim book and a fast read, so it would be easy to use to supplement other assignments.

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