Our fourth lesson of this module started with a twenty minute message regarding students missing so many classes. Although this was done to advise students that missing time in classes can cause them to fail or be removed from the module, I feel as though the particular individuals who had been missing sessions could have been taken to once side to have this conversation. Personally, I have not missed a single session and therefore felt as though my important teaching time was used to mention this issue to a minority of the class.
Once this talk was finished, we were instructed to open ‘Dream Weaver’, a software programme for designing web pages. Last week’s blog explained how we had previously struggled to log into this software, however, these particular issues had been resolved ready for this week’s session. As it was the first time each of us had logged into this software, it resulted in numerous issues. The main one of these which seemed to run throughout the whole session was that the group were continuously on different stages to each other. This led to many students, including myself waiting around. I understand that during a session like this one, these issues cannot be easily helped, however, in the future, it could be beneficial to have a step by step instruction manual for each student to allow them to work at their own pace. This would allow the students who needed extra help to receive it, while not affecting the other students session.
The main focus of this session was CSS, this is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS pinpoints how the developer wants the HTML displayed on the page. We were instructed to copy the CSS codes from the board into our dream weaver software. While this kind of task can be extremely disengaging for me usually, I found that the software had code tips which came up as I began typing which were extremely helpful. Another benefit of using the dream weaver software was that if I had unintentionally typed in a code wrong, it would alert me by turning the line number bright red. I feel as thought I felt this benefit even more after using text edit to type up HTML last week which did not have this feature enabled.
Using the CSS code I was able to create a webpage with a specific layout and add five other pages which were connected to the main homepage.
Although initially I found the dream weaver software very daunting, I very easily got used to the basics of it and I was able to complete all of the tasks set. At the end of the session Mark gave us time to experiment with our webpages which we had made and I wanted to make all the five pages have different background colours. Although we were not instructed how to do this task, I was able to use my newly found knowledge to create new CSS documents which contained the different background colours which I was then able to apply to the five web pages I had previously created. Being able to do this made me feel like I had genuinely learnt a new skill during this session and I left feeling very positive about the session.
Rebecca.
Rebecca's Educational Blog 