Come To Our Art Museum

Friday has rolled around and I am beginning my "Art Museum" unit with the 2nd Period Graphic Arts and Web Design Class. This is the same lesson that Mr. Denise gave to the 3rd Period class back about two months ago. If you were reading at the time, it is the lesson which brought about the Dragon story.

Anyway, the kids are to design a website for an art museum. The art museum either has Renaissance, Western or Modern art. Kids get to pick which. During the course of the lesson, the students will be learning about website color selection, banners, animated menus, tables, photo galleries and templates. These things are all of the basic moneymaking tools that web designers use to impress their clients.

We started on the first lesson with a basic overview of the value of learning website design skills and then went through a role play, where the class was the website designer and I was the client. We started with colors and banners. Banners are the eye-catching graphic logos at the tops of websites that tell you where you are on the Internet. They put those together and then I had the kids switch one seat to the left and offer critiques to the designers.

Then, we talked about the different parts of the website, what pages might be needed on the site and so forth. The kids started their home page of the website using table to format their elements. They created a basic, boring menu. Then, the client indicates that they would like something a little fancier for their menu. I showed them how to create rollover buttons in Fireworks, our graphics program. Then the bell rang and it was time to go.

Things went pretty well for the most part. Usually, in a computer project, Mr. Jewett will give a basic skills lecture and then let the kids go. Today, the kids had to stick with the instruction step by step. It was hard for some kids, but most of them got it.