What's Going On? October 31st through November 4th

Lesson 8: Thinking Inside the Box

This week students will complete lesson 8 in class.  Along with this lesson, students will read chapter 14 in the textbook, complete the reading guide, and web assignment 8a.  Students will have Monday to learn some new web techniques with our notes day and Tuesday/Wednesday and Thursday as work days.  The entire class will participate in a class review on Friday to go over some HTML and CSS techniques.

During this week's assignment, we will focus on the "Box Model".  We will take a look at how to add spacing with padding and margin.  We will also practice adding stylized borders into our pages.

Midterm Project

It is really important that students are on pace at the end of this week since we will have our midterm project next week.  Students will start the project on Monday and MUST upload it by the end of class on Friday.  Students will be given screen shots of the final project and will have all week to come up with the HTML and CSS coding to create the website.  Students can use their resources: the textbook, old web assignments, and the internet in order to complete the assignment.  Students MAY NOT work together.  Students who need additional work time beyond what is provided in class must make arrangements before school, during lunch or after school to have the lab open.

What's Going On? October 24th through October 26th

Lesson 7: Colors and Backgrounds

During this short week of school, web students will work on finishing up our seventh unit on colors and backgrounds.  With this lesson, students have the opportunity to try out different background images and address different ways to add color to our pages.  

Students are considered "on pace" for the class after the lesson 7 multiple choice review questions are complete and the web assignments 7a, 7b, and 7c are uploaded to Google Drive by the end of class on Tuesday.

During class on Wednesday, we will review some past web concepts, including how to mark-up text into sections using <div> tags.

What's Going On? October 17th through October 21st

Unit 6: Intro to CSS

At this point in the semester, students have pretty much learned all of the necessary HTML document markup required.  We still could use some more practice marking up sections of text, but so far students have shown a grasp of our basic header, paragraph, list, and image tags.

For a quick review of div tags and how they work to mark up sections of text, you could check out this video:

For lesson 6 we will start modifying the look of our page using CSS.  For this lesson's assignments, we will have our textbook reading along with the accompanying reading guide, our 10 lesson review multiple choice questions and three web pages.  This week all three web assignments will be presented as follow-along tutorials in the textbook.  I highly encourage students to READ about the changes they are making to the code so that when it comes time to make these changes on our own, we understand the reasoning behind the code syntax.

Students are considered "on pace" for the class if the lesson 6 assignments are complete by the end of our class on Tuesday/Wednesday.  Students who need additional time in the lab are encouraged to come in early (the lab opens at 7am) or during their lunch period.

After lesson 6 is complete, we will move on to lesson 7 where we will learn about how to make more changes to color and backgrounds using CSS.

What's Going On? October 10th through October 14th

Checking In

Last week students filled out a form reflecting on their current progress in the course.  These forms should be signed by someone at home and then returned to me.  Since this course is offered in partnership with WCTC and students who successfully complete the class with a "C" or higher will earn WCTC and North credit, I want to maintain an open line of communication so that there are no "surprises" at the end of the semester.


Finishing Up Lesson 5 and Starting Lesson 6

It seemed as if students needed some extra time last week finishing up on lesson 4, so we did not begin lesson 5 until the end of last week.  With lesson 5, students explored more about adding images to web pages and learned how to make an image map.  Students will apply these techniques in the three web pages that go along with lesson 5.  The plan is to finish up lesson 5 this week on Tuesday/Wednesday and begin lesson 6 on Thursday.  Students should have their lesson 5 reading guides completed by Monday's class and be prepared to take our 10 multiple choice review questions on Tuesday/Wednesday.  Reading guides and the lesson review questions can be found on BlackBoard, so please be prepared!

We started to use the industry-standard software, Adobe DreamWeaver, last week.  This is an extremely costly program so it is probably not something easily accessible to students outside of our computer lab.  If students need some additional time to work they can see me.  I arrive to school by 7am each day and would be more than happy to open the lab.

What's Going On? October 3rd through October 7th

Finishing Up Lesson 4
Last week was kind of a crazy week.  We ended up taking a little longer than expected to go through our notes this week so that we could go over some important concepts that we covered during our lesson 3 assignments.  Plus, our class periods were cut short due to all of the Homecoming festivities.  It seems like students needed a little bit of extra time to finish up our projects for lesson 4, so students will have Monday's class period as a catch-up day.  Students are considered "on pace" for the course if all of lesson 4 has been uploaded to Google Drive by the end of Monday's class.  Students who find that they need some extra time to work are welcome to talk with me about getting into the computer lab before school.

Lesson 5: Images and Image Maps
This week we will start using our industry-standard software, DreamWeaver.  Now that students are starting to get a handle on the basic structure of HTML, we will start using DreamWeaver.  This software will allow us to more easily create links and mark-up our documents.  Students will appreciate the "split-screen" view of DreamWeaver where they will be able to see their HTML code and a browser simulation side-by-side.

During this week's lesson, students will use DreamWeaver to add images to our web pages.  While we have been doing this before, we will learn about some additional properties where we can specify the height and the width of our image.  

<img src = "images/picture.jpg" alt="Picture Discription" height="100" width="150">

Students will also learn how to create an image map.  This is a clickable image that allows us to create different "hotspots" to navigate to different web pages.  DreamWeaver makes the process of making an image map much easier!

Along with this week's assignments, students will need to read chapter 7 and complete the accompanying reading guide.  The reading guide will be due by Thursday's class and we will complete our weekly review questions at the beginning of class on Friday.

What's Going On? September 26th through 30th

 Lesson 4: Links

This week students will be working on lesson 4.  During this unit students will learn how to create links to visit external websites, to link pages within their website and to create links within a page.

We will talk about how to create an absolute link to an existing website:

      <a href = "http://www.waukeshanorth.org">Waukesha North Home Page</a>


We will talk about how to create a relative link within our website:

    <a href = "index.html">Website Home Page</a>


We will also talk about how to create a link fragment (linking within a page):

   <h1 id="top">Top of the Page</h1>

    <a href = "#top">Back to the top of the page</a>


Lastly, we will talk about how to create an e-mail link:

  <a href = "mailto:kkamenar@waukesha.k12.wi.us">E-Mail Mrs. Kamenar</a>


This week students will have a reading guide to complete by Thursday's class.  We will also have our ten multiple choice questions as a summative assessment on Friday.  I encourage students to pre-plan their answers to these questions.  Students can find the questions with answer choices on BlackBoard and they were also included on the backside of this week's reading guide.  Students will also complete three assignments related to link creation: 4a, 4b, and 4c.

Students are considered "on pace" if unit 4 is complete by the end of class on Friday.  If students need additional time in the lab, please check with me.  We can arrange a time before or after school.

What's Going On? September 19th through September 23rd

Lesson 3: Marking Up Text

This week students will be reading chapter 5 in our textbook and completing the accompanying reading guide.  This will help students prepare for our multiple choice questions that we see at the end of the week.  Students are reminded to plan their answers to the questions ahead of time.  This assessment is open-book, open-note, open-internet.  All of the multiple choice questions can be found in the student handout which is accessible on BlackBoard and also by clicking here.

This week we will focus on some additional HTML markup techniques, including how to make lists and how to markup text into sections using <div>, <article>, and <section> tags.  We will learn about these skills and try them out together early in the week.  Students will then have the opportunity to try out these skills on their own with assignments 3a, 3b, and 3c.

Students will be considered "on pace" for the course, if lesson 3 is complete by the end of the week.