Your thoughts please

[7hunters]

I'm going to be teaching a seminar on Dreamweaver coming up in a few weeks. I'm not thrilled it's called Dreamweaver, it's like calling carpentry 'Hammer', or 'Nails 101'. I'm worried that people might 'get' how to use Dreamweaver but then lack the basic skills to put a site up on the net. What I want is for them to be able to acheive their goals on the internet.

Also the current curriculum teaches deprecated tags and I'll agree they are easier but I feel bad teaching something that will be replaced soon...or will it? I'm wondering if the 'people' will allow the W3C and organizations to take away their usability of making simple websites? There area lot of good reason to implement the changes but I can see how there is a lot of resistance too.

I'm not sure of my students levels of computer expertise. The last teacher gave up even teaching them to build a table. I'm afraid to mention the word CSS.

I don't have anyone to talk to about web design (who understands a word I'm saying) so thought I wuold ask the board for its thoughts.

I'm also going to take my MX certification in a week and wondered if any of you had taken the exam?

Thanks -7

[toicontien]

I'm teaching a web design portion of a journalism course at Central Michigan University. They have to write and create a print edition and an online edition.

They don't know HTML. Journalism students can barely use e-mail. :mad:

If the school you are at wants to teach them web design, students NEED to know HTML. People will tell you otherwise, but no professional mechanic would fix a car without knowing how an engine works. HTML and CSS is the engine. You're not doing them any good by teaching them the WYSIWYG part of Dreamweaver and not the code behind it.

Start out basic. Get them introduced to text formatting tags (yes, even the font tag) and work your way up to creating tables of info. Then go into table-based layouts. Then introduce them to CSS. If there's time, go into CSS-based layouts. If not, just go right into Dreamweaver then and show them how to point-and-click their way to having Dreamweaver write the code they know already.

I had to take the other route. The students didn't actually learn anything. They know how to cut and paste body text into pre-existing templates. And when you teach them the Dreamweaver part, teach in the split code/design view.

Bottom line: You can't teach web design in one class, but colleges, schools, and universities insist on it anyhow.