[Year 12 IPM] CSS Critique Invited - to Laurie from Keith

[Laurie Savage]

Thanks Bill,

On Wed, Dec 28, 2005 at 01:09:17AM +1100 or thereabouts, Bill Kerr wrote:
> thanks Keith, your enthusiasm is contagious - I'm a bit rusty and need a
> push to further develop my css skills
> 
> Laurie, I like your site
> http://moodle.pvgc.vic.edu.au/~sav/web_101/02.html
> looks great, nice lessons
> 
I'm flattered :-)

> > alternate style sheet via View menu
> that looks great, I'll be using that!!
> suggest you put clear instructions on the page about doing that, some might
> miss it, I would have unless you had explicitly pointed it out
Yes, I didn't know about the feature until after writing the pages - my
students all use IE so I didn't want to confuse them more!

> 
> > web developer firefox extension
> thanks for the reminder about this, I've tried before, will try again in a
> sec
> 
> I like the back to basics raw XHTML and CSS approach using notepad
> 
I might try HTML Kit with my better students - depends on what next
year's crop is like - we don't tend to get our best kids in IT because
of cultural and timetabling issues.

> I wrote some lessons using notepad to develop web pages for year 9s at my
> school. We have 3 or 4 different teachers each year teaching from notes and
> it surprised me that they have for the last 2 or 3 years all declared
> themselves to be very happy doing it with notepad. I had thought that they
> would have applied pressure for a visual editor.
> 
> The lesson sequence is:
> 1) find the lyrics of a song or poem you like and some matching pics
> 2) follow the worksheets to develop 4 different web page versions of this
> same song
> a) just HTML
> b) simple style for headings, background colour, links
> c) heading in a box
> d) watermark background image
> e) simple menu
> 
> I can put the worksheets and exemplar on my website if anyone is interested
> just yell out

I'm always interested in sharing and learning and would like to see your
work. I've been down this track (song lyrics) with some embedded CSS in the
head section with a good year 8  class - the song lyrics are a great motivator, but there are copyright issues.

> I've recently discovered notepad2
> http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
> which has syntax highlighting for HTML
> 
> So I thought in 2006 I'd ask the year 9 teachers to have a look at both
> notepad2 and NVU, which is an open source visual editor
> http://www.nvu.com/and ask them which way they want to go
> 
NVU is a rehash of the old NS Composer. I'm not sure if I want to go
that way because I think WYSIWYG layout editors don't force semantic
writing. The students/teachers start using H1 for large, bold type and
suddenly the kids are writing pages full of <font color="hotpink">!
> --
> Bill Kerr
> http://billkerr.blogspot.com/
> http://users.tpg.com.au/billkerr/index.htm
> 

Laurie
-- 
Laurie Savage
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http://moodle.pvgc.vic.edu.au/~sav
Physics/IT Teacher, Pascoe Vale Girls College
Pascoe Vale, Victoria. +613 9306 2544
=============================================