Working on Web Design 2 Curriculum... Sharing GREAT resources! #busedu

I've been revamping my Web Design 2 curriculum. This course starts up in January and I realize that I have to move into more responsive web design and mobile design this year. I am also finally abandoning Flash.  Also, I have some students who will be in the class straight out of Web Design 1 this semester and others that may be a year removed from taking the prerequisite. So, a review is necessary.

I also don't dive into the box model too much (we just do a basic DIV and then a stack of DIVs on the final project) since it's just a semester in Web Design 1. So, I get into that pretty heavily in Web Design 2.

So, I've been working through some online Udacity lessons. I have found one that I really like that will work as both a review and a thorough introduction to understanding the box model--
https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-html-and-css--ud304

Description:  In this course you will learn how to convert digital design mockups into static web pages. We will teach you how to approach page layout, how to break down a design mockup into page elements, and how to implement that in HTML and CSS.

You will also learn about responsive design techniques, which are increasingly important in a world where mobile devices and TV screens are used more and more often to look for information and entertainment.

It has videos you watch and then applications you can do in a text editor and using Chrome Dev Tools. And, it "quizzes" along the way.

Today, when I was working through it, she was talking about how a webpage is made up of rectangles and then demonstrated by actually printing a page and cutting out boxes. I thought... great idea! Why didn't I think of that?

Just wanted to share that, but also recommend this short course. The instructor tries to be funny, so it's not hard to watch.  It's three lessons leading into a "project" and it says the entire module will take roughly three weeks to complete (assuming 6 hours a week working at your own pace). I'm not sure I'll assign the students the entire module, but once I'm done with it, I'll have a better idea. I think my students will be faster since they all will come in with fundamentals. But, we'll see.

If anything, it would be great for you to work through as an instructor to give you some instructional strategies. They use some great metaphors for explaining the concepts.

I do know that for the first week, I am going to have them sign up and work through FreeCodeCamp. There is an HTML5 and CSS module that takes about 5 hours to complete. This site is much like Codecademy if you've used that (and we do in Web Design 1).  And, that module covers pretty much everything I cover in Web Design 2. They also have a responsive web design with Bootstrap module that I haven't tried yet but intend to work through as well.

Hope this helps someone else. Happy web designing, friends!

Fun Multimedia Video Project! #busedu #multimedia

I decided to come up with something a little different this year as the final project in Multimedia, so this is it. I watched several videos to get ideas (you'll see those links on the scoring guide), but none of them met all the competencies I wanted covered. Thus, this Personal Narrative Project was born.

They had three different theme options-- movie review, DIY video, or "Surviving High School" narrative video.

Here's my example Movie Review:

And here's the scoring guide we used. So far, they seem to be enjoying it, but I'll know more in about a week! This semester went by so quickly!
http://classjump.com/s/skinner/documents/Personal_Narrative_Cutaway_Project_5943.pdf

Computer Keyboarding Rant...is Typing a Lost Art? #busedu

We had a meeting today to discuss our grades 6-12 curriculum. It was time spent talking in our vertical team with administration present about new course offerings and what should be offered when.

Coming out of this meeting, I had a thought. Is keyboarding even a thing anymore? Honestly.

I find it incredibly useful to know how to touch type. I know it makes me much more efficient, especially when typing long documents or in web design when coding. I don't know how someone could code quickly if they had to look down at their fingers constantly.  But, my own 13-year old daughter doesn't type "properly" with her hands on her home row. She doesn't look (too much) but she doesn't use the right fingers. She was formally taught to type in 7th grade last year, but the teacher doesn't correct her form. And, why would she? The girl types over 40 wpm most of the time and often times, closer to 60!

I found this article dated November 24, 2014, about how he feels that for many programmers, the "single big efficiency improvement that can be made to their technique is to learn to touch type."
The author (a computer programmer) also states, "What really amazes me, is that after years of doing it and getting by, many programmers like a lot of other computer users don't know that there is a right way to type. They have just observed the simple fact that some people seem to be able to type faster than they can and sort of assume that it must be just practice - and one day they will get to the same level of speed."

I just wonder if this generation of youth honestly don't see a reason to know how to type. I know that they see the ol' QWERTY keyboard on their phones when they text people. And, we all know they can text faster with two thumbs than I can with 10 fingers. I presume that means they know where the letters are. But, they pretty much all learn first on an iPad or some sort of device (admit it, your 5 year old uses an iPad!) and teaching them to "type right" at the age of 13 would require slowing them down. Most students have no interest in that.

Many programmers (who responded on the comments on that article) claim to be getting by just fine with a hunt and peck method. Others say that "composing" code is more about figuring out what to write and not doing it fast. But, in a classroom of computers, I would almost bet that my faster typists (of course, fast doesn't mean proper technique!) are also my strongest computer students. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd love to do that research.

As a teacher who doesn't teach that age and who doesn't teach typing since I'm in a senior high school, I am just curious how others feel about this. Is typing a lost art? I'm beginning to wonder.

Cooperative Learning Update #busedu

Well, I've done it. I've gone over a month without a blog post! It seems so easy to start the year with the ambition to write twice a week, but here I have gone five weeks and posted nothing. However, I have been busy. Since that time, I've been to Connecticut for their Business Education Conference and I've traveled to serve on the Business, Marketing, and Information Technology Advisory committee for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in Missouri. So, I have been busy. Oh, and I got my Google Level 2 certification, too. I guess October was a busy month!

Yesterday, I was one of my school "volunteers" to let a visiting school observe my classroom. They wanted to see some cooperative learning strategies in action. So, I chose to demonstrate Quiz, Quiz, Trade with my Web Design class. We started Adobe Fireworks about a week ago in that class and I wanted to work on their vocabulary. It seems in my computer classes, students can learn to "do" things but often don't know what those things are called. That rings especially true for tools. They know that the "tool with the pointing finger" is the one they want, but they forget it's called the Smudge tool, for example. So, I created a StudyStack for the class on Fireworks. Then, I went to the Print option and printed front/back index card. We used these cards for the class activity.

It went well. Many commented on how they learned a few things that I only mentioned once in the lectures the previous week (particularly the colors in a JPG vs. GIF) or the names of a few tools. And, they were all engaged, active and moving around. So, that was a win.

After that, we came back to the room, I did a 7 minute demo on something that I hadn't discussed much, and then they partnered up to do what I called "Howdy Partner" Fireworks activity. Essentially, it was steps for how to edit and animate a baby clipart. But, instead of how I have done this in the past with my Photoshop class, these kiddos had to fill in some blanks (that referenced the vocabulary we'd used in the StudyStack) before they were allowed to begin. Then, each partner had a role and they'd switch back and forth as to who was running the mouse and who was reading the instructions. Here's a screen capture of page 1--

It went super well, and the visiting teachers seemed to really enjoy the lesson. And, my kids were totally engaged the whole hour.

It's sometimes difficult to really do cooperative learning in the computer classroom, but the rewards are worth it.

Happy Wednesday, friends!

Scoot Activity in Computers!

I got the idea for a Scoot activity after reading some math blogs, actually. Apparently, some cool math teachers have come up with a "moving" worksheet type activity where you place flashcards or some math problem or activity at each desk and students "scoot" through them at intervals.

This sounded like something fun to try in my computer-based classes. And, in Photoshop, they've just learned selection tools, including how to add and subtract from selection. I thought this might be a fun way to practice. So, I put a folder of images out on a drive. They opened the background image, saved it to their folder, and then began selecting the first item from the folder to bring over to the background. After about 5 minutes, I announced SCOOT! They moved on, regardless of how finished the selection was, and scooted to the next seat. Then, they had to pick up where the previous person left off. When a selection is completed, they were to Refine Edge, bring it over to the background, and rename the layer. After the first long round, I used set intervals.

I used an interval timer online from http://www.intervaltimer.com and set it to no warm up and no cool down and just set a time of 120 seconds for the "high intensity" or work time and 15 seconds for the "low intensity" or scoot time. I'll do this again in my afternoon class and will probably adjust that a bit to 150 seconds of work time and 30 seconds to scoot.

I also threw in few kinks to change it up. A few times, I would announce specific instructions like:

• Double scoot (scoot two seats instead of one)
• Random scoot (like musical chairs, scoot wherever you want)
• Observation even or odd (so, that means if you are at an odd computer and I called Observe Odd instead of Scoot, you stand and just watch people if you are at an odd computer and provide feedback if you see someone doing something ineffectively or just watch and see how others are using tools)

It worked out pretty well. However, I did run across one problem at the end. A few students had NOTHING drug into their main image. So, not sure if someone deleted the selected items or if no one ever drug something over because the selections were never complete. I'll have to monitor that a little better when I try it with the afternoon class. A few of the items were really hard, so I might suggest some of the easier ones to be the first ones they do just to make sure everyone does finish something as part of the composite.

As with most learning activities, I don't take grades so no one was penalized if they got back to their computer and there wasn't much to work with. But, I did give them about 10 minutes back on their home computers at the end of class.

Students seemed to like moving around and the class period zoomed by. We'll see how it goes with some tweaking. But, I'm excited to try this sometime with my Web Design class in a coding exercise!

My Flashcard Preference--StudyStack!

I just wanted to take a minute to give a shout out to a website I love to use for study review for my students. It seems every list of online tools seems to include Quizlet, which is a good tool. I've used it, too. But, my students really prefer StudyStack and here's why:

1. More options for interacting with the cards. Quizlet has only two games and a test module. StudyStack has test, quiz, matching, crossword, hangman, unscramble, chopped and more! There's lots of options.
2. Android app is out now! They plan to release an iOS one soon. But, you don't need an app to use it. It runs just fine in the browser.

Here are a few screenshots. My students love the Hungry Bug game (it gets hard because your bug grows as you answer correctly and the bug cannot run into the sides, into himself, or into the wrong answer!). 

Matching:

Chopped:

So, just sharing. It's a great resource. And, if you want to see, my StudyStacks are located here:
 http://www.studystack.com/users/skindawg

Trying to do "More Google" stuff... #GoogleEdu #teachertools

This summer, I received my Google Certified Educator level 1 certification. As I am working on level 2 now, I am trying to incorporate more "Google things" into my curriculum, either for students or as tools for myself. I saw the other day where someone used a Google Form to collect student submissions for online work (genius!); they post their email, name, URL of project, and comments or a reflection, whatever you need into a simple Google Form so the teacher doesn't have to check emails or have them write down the info.

My students had already uploaded work for grading to SchoolTube, an online video hosting site, in my Multimedia class. And, I was in the middle of moderating their submissions when I wondered if I could just enter their scores and feedback on a Google Sheet and maybe somehow email that information to them. Ideally, I would have had them do the hard work for me and enter in a form, but it was too late for that, so I just typed in their names, plugged in their student emails (only 20 kids so I looked them up quickly), put a Score column and a Notes column and graded away. Then, I hoped I'd find a solution.

I've used Flubaroo before, but I couldn't easily figure out how to mail my score and notes through that. And, after tweeting to Alice Keeler (@alicekeeler), a Google guru, I figured I'd take her advice and try Yet Another Mail Merge, another Google plug-in. Mind you, I don't really read instructions much, so I went poking away trying to figure it out.

My thoughts:

First, get into Gmail and type an email that has "mostly" what you want to say. Mine wasn't fancy. I put the assignment name and a box that said Score and Notes/Feedback. Then, I put my name and a smiley.  I didn't send the email from Gmail; it was just a "draft" in my Gmail.  Oh, and you had to put those double chevrons on either side of the "field names" from your Google Sheet. So, I put <<Score>> and <<Notes>> on there where I needed that information merged (like a Word mail merge, mostly). Fortunately, I picked a YAMM template and modified it and it had a note about that. Score.

Second, I went back to the other tab where my Google Sheet was and added the add-in for this mail merge thingy. It popped up and I had to allow some stuff. Then, it was pretty self-explanatory. I picked my "draft" from the list and put the return email and such. I added myself to the spreadsheet before I did this so I could see what the email would look like.

Here is what my students received (of course, mine is perfect, but they had much more detailed feedback on what was missing or needed improvement):

This worked great! Next time, I'll have them enter their info so I don't have to do all the work (or maybe I'll just duplicate this Sheet and use it again). You are limited to 100 emails per day on this YAMM plug-in, but I have so many different classes I teach that none of my classes are more than 50 kids, so as long as I only do one class in a day, I'm good.

I have student portfolios for another class where they submit work, so this might be another easy way to collect direct URLs for those and to easily grade those projects. I know there are other plug-ins that are rubric based, so maybe that will be my next challenge.

Anyway, hope this helps someone! :)