Category: teaching tips

Presentation: Ten Checkpoints of a Web Standards Based Curriculum

I presented this at HighEdWebDev 2007 today. It was presented as a powerpoint presentation. My narrative explained that this presentation was mainly about what sort of student learning outcomes I would expect to see in an institution where web standards were part of the curriculum. I did touch on a couple of important overall considerations as well.

I have captured only the slides and converted them into a movie. There is no sound. Please return to this post if you have comments or questions.

View the movie.

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Teaching by blog

I heard from teacher Bob Minott about a blog he started as a way to continue teaching while he’s away for two weeks on an expedition. He said,

Teachers that are terrified at creating blogs are welcome to view my first attempt at a multi-media blog.

There’s an Earthwatch landing page that serves several teachers. When you click Mr. Minott, you read a brief bio about Bob and then see the link to his blog. It is Bob’s blog where the action is for his students. He notes,

That is where you will find a variety of things. Hopefully, each teacher will be posting pictures, videos, voice clips and a diary. The blogs should each have a place for student’s and teacher’s comments. Children are welcome to do this from home, so feel free to give them the web address (all comments are “filtered”). They do not need a Google ID, if they click “anonymous.” Remind them NOT to use their last names. Ex: Billy K. , Mrs. Frank’s 7th Grade class.

Sound like a perfect way to keep his class back home engaged in the process while providing interesting information and inviting their participation.

Construct an online quiz

Quiz Press is a small software tool that makes quizzes and converts them to a combination of Flash and HTML for online use. It costs $50 and works on both Mac and Windows.

Users must have Flash 7 to work the tests. There’s a free demo. You can only make a 5 question quiz with the demo version, but I downloaded it and made a quiz. Take a run through my example quiz.

I tried one of every sort of question it will make: true or false, fill in the blank, cloze, multiple choice and short answer. You can have the results emailed to you, and you can require that students include their name (I didn’t put that in my example quiz.)

Drawbacks I saw were that the quiz requires Flash, and there is no management of results on the back end to help the teacher track things. You’d have to deal with individually emailed results. However, I think many people might find this a useful bit of software.

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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.

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