I Bomb On Another Lesson...

It is now day two and a half of my unit with the 2nd Period Graphic Arts and Web Design Class. They are developing Art Museum websites. So far, their stuff has looked pretty good. Today, we moved on to the hard stuff.

Web developers use templates to create websites. A template is the backbone of the website and contains the parts of the webpage that will not change from page to page, such as the navigation menus, the web page banners, and so forth. When your website has a template, you can open the template and change one thing, add a new link, for instance, and all of your pages will automatically be updated. Without a template, one must open Page One, add the link, save the page, open Page Two, add the link, save the page, open Page Three, add the link, save the page, you get the idea.

Apparently, this is a tough concept for kids to grasp, though, as we really struggled to open the page that we had been making in class, save it as a template and then create new pages from the template. I had to describe the process about three different ways before the kids understood. Maybe it was me, maybe it was them, I am not sure.

Anyway, then we are creating all of our new pages, updating our links and putting content into the pages. Next class period, we are to be working on our "Art Galleries," also known as Web Albums.

A few kids start checking to see if their stuff is working right by previewing the pages on Internet Explorer. Links and pictures are broken all over the place. I look at a couple of kids' sites.

Oh.

Wow.

That stinks!

When Mr. Denise started this unit a month or so ago, one of the first things that he did was have the kids all define a new site. This tells the program that all of the stuff that we do on this website will come from the same place. The kids all have sites defined already, that is how they upload their webpages for grading when they complete a project. I seem to have overlooked the "create a new site" part of the unit plan. Oops.

What has happened is that the shiny new templates that the kids are creating are being saved in one part of their folders and the content pages appear to be saving in another part of their folders and half of their information is getting lost. I am hoping that I can figure out a way to fix this by Friday...

Part of the difficulty here is that Mr. Denise and Mr. Jewett both operate as teachers in "autopilot" mode. They have both been doing the same assignments and same units in Computer class for many years. They don't have lesson plans. They don't have project rubrics. While I did sit through Mr. Denise's presentation of the Art Museum project two months ago, I don't remember every little step in the process. Most of the time, I can improvise. If I leave out a little step, that's ok, as long as the kids are learning. However, it appears as if I left off a rather important small step in this lesson and things may be messed up for ever.

One thing that I have discovered about Junior High kids is that they generally do not have very good troubleshooting skills. If a problem arises with a computer program or project, they are much more likely to quit or start all over again than they are to try to fix what they have. This may mean trashing or starting the Museum project over again. We'll see.