I have taught web design for 7 years now, and every year it gets easier – for me and for the students. The more practice I get with teaching them, the easier it is for me to see exactly what they need, and when. I love the feeling of making a new technology tool accessible to all students by consistently improving my teaching based on their feedback. But something even more interesting happened this year…

All of our middle school students now have their own blogs. We have set them up through integrated units in social studies and English over the course of the semester. As we all know, maintaining a blog is much easier than designing a website from scratch, even if you are using the design view in a software application like Macromedia Dreamweaver. But, I have seen something change in our students this year. Usually they are intimidated by Dreamweaver, and struggle with setting up a functioning page, even sometimes struggling with the concept of linking (even though they do it every day when they navigate the web). This year, though, things were different.

As soon as I explained the concept to my 6th, 7th and 8th graders, the ideas started percolating. The designs for a masthead, the organization of the page, the external pages to link to, etc. Before we even started creating their electronic portfolios, they had a vision in their heads of what they wanted. They were ready to tackle the challenges of Dreamweaver because they already had the basics of linking, inserting and aligning images, and organizing pages and links from their blogging experience. And that blogging experience was so smooth and easy to understand that they felt much more comfortable building on those skills to design their own website.

The transformation of our students in such a short period of time just boggles my mind. Since I have arrived in Malaysia, I have found that our students on the whole are a bit weaker in terms of technology than my students in Munich, and I have been working to increase their confidence each year. This year, with the integration of technology into the core curriculum, and the use of exciting new web 2.0 tools has shot us forward by several years.

The electronic portfolios the middle school students have been able to produce this year are outstanding. Many of them have designed their own mastheads and created buttons and thumbnails with Photoshop, and they have all inserted Flash animations and QuickTime files directly into the page, and utilized good web design skills to make their pages easy to read and understand. I can see clearly that this transition has come from their increased comfort level with these skills, through the use of IT in the core classes.

As I explained to my sixth graders yesterday, my goal as a technology teacher is to help increase each student’s level of confidence with technology. I want my students to be able to sit down in front of any computer, Mac or PC, Linux or Windows, or whatever comes next, and feel like they can accomplish their goals – even if it involves using an application or tool they’ve never seen before. I know first hand what it feels like to be faced with new technology every day, and that feeling of satisfaction and success when you have accomplished your task with a new tool under your belt.

Image 1 from: http://www.actacenter.com/IMG/jpg/dreamweaver.jpg
Image 2 from: http://www.nof-club.de/toto/fairnews/thumbs/photoshop_icon.jpg