In SSP today, Jenna and Kar introduced the class to HTML coding. Part of the class already knew a little about HTML, so Kar taught them advanced HTML. They worked with CSS, external style sheets, internal style sheets, and pseudo classes.
Jenna's students opened Text Wrangler to create their very first webpages. HTML documents are bound by items called tags: "" begins an HTML
document and "" ends a document. These bracketed headers are called tags; the general
format for a tag is content. the students learned many formatting commands for their websites. They changed the size of their headings, and learned how to center text on a page. They also personalized their pages by adding code to include pictures. In the "body" or main section of the webpages, Jenna showed the class how to bold, italicize, underline, color, and change the font of the text. She used visabone.com to find custom colors that were safe to use in her page. This page will provide a hex value - a six-digit value which defines a specific color - black's hex value is #000000.
Next, the students made lists about themselves: their hobbies and things they liked to do. They used two kinds of lists, unordered (bulleted) lists and ordered (numbered) lists. They also formed tables for their pages and collected name and age data from their classmates. The kids really enjoyed writing their own webpages and peppering Jenna with questions. The students presented their personal sites to the class along with a little about themselves when they were finished.
To concentrate asking specific questions, and as an introdution to Monte's lesson, the students received cards printed with animal names. the cards were taped to the students' backs and each student had to guess his animal.
Monte introduced the PHP (hypertext processing) programming language to the students with the uses of programming - the main one was cutting down on the massive amounts of copying and pasting. The students practiced using commands like hidden values in their code, and then built a checkout line model to submit and receive data in HTML.
PHP was very similar to HTML, but Monte taught the students how to use certain functions (parts of code that are already written) in the PHP document. The students liked working on this project too - they liked the idea of saving something to the web. Monte taught the class how to use control structures, conditional statements, comparisons, and while loops through the checkout program modifications in PHP. Tomorrow morning, the students will complete their programs.