Comments on: What do HTML and Latin have in common?

By: John Johnston

John Johnston — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:15:05 +0000

As a primary teacher I probably do not understand the issues but my 2 pence worth. Teach to create a very basic html structure, body, main,header, content, menu. Then use css to experiment with this and have fun. A page with a javascript to switch stylesheets might be interesting?

By: Dai Barnes

Dai Barnes — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:08:59 +0000

I get mine to do HTML from scratch, one or two pages in notepad, to really understand. Include colour, various text samples, an image, a hyperlink and embed some youtube.

Then take the page to dreamweaver, copy the page and change the content and start to explore navigation possibilities. However, here I cop out. Rather than getting the DW sites online with some fancy system we don’t have (no internal hosting), I get them to create a Google site embedding Office docs converted to Google docs of their school work (2 or 3 subjects) and then email the relevant links to their teachers for praise; work is also photographed or scanned where appropriate.

The idea here is not to teach everything (although CSS is the biggie in my mind) but to teach integration and dynamic solution. However, having said that they are Year 8 and have 1 * 40 minute lesson per week. Lessons are therefore too fast so all work must be doable at home to make learning have any significant process and progress. It is a challenge.

Would love to know your current model for coping with same issues.

:O)D

By: Colin Maxwell

Colin Maxwell — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:59:34 +0000

HTML and CSS are all we teach at college up to National Certificate level, but Ajax, more advanced CSS and other skills are taught in following years from HNC, HND to Degree. These are all big, big subjects, and not something that students can grasp easily or quickly. Starting with HTML and moving on to CSS (not that hard really, esp. if you have Dreamweaver) is good. Then followed by a little scripting such as Javascript. At that point, students will have decided whether they want to, or can do programming and can move on to AJAX, PHP, etc.

However, we should also be looking at using blogs, wikis and alternative methods of creating websites, as the majority of current students will use one of these at some point in their life. The techy stuff is still for techies.

HTML certainly isn’t dead – all websites rely on it to some extent (and HTML 5 will be widespread soon). So it ain’t dead, unlike Latin.

By: happyhippy

happyhippy — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:06:02 +0000

It has the potential to be of interest to academics and historians, but used little day to day. An exaggerated illustration of my pondering.

By: Neil Adam

Neil Adam — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:07:56 +0000

So what does it have in common with Latin?

I would go with your gut reactions too.