Maybe it's a little cheesy, or maybe it's a product of my age, but one of the things I thought while we studied teaching HTML this last week is what would motivate students to learn it? Back when I was younger, we picked up little bits and pieces of HTML to do things like make our MySpace pages a particular color, or to do interesting things to blog posts. What drives students to learn HTML now? So many sites allow you to use HTML but also have tools ready so you don't have to. My curiosity on this topic drove me back to a time where students were learning HTML before MySpace, among other times and projects.
This interest in the motivation of students learning HTML brought me back to 1995 where Nancy Barkhouse and her students embarked on a journey to learn about websites and how to make them. Back then, internet sites were still pretty new for most students and teachers. Barkhouse (1997) describes the many considerations she had to make at a time that teaching young students to write HTML code hadn't been done -- at least not to the extent that she could easily find materials and information on it. The class was self-motivated to surf the web to find different sites they liked while they planned a site for their school. Although the teacher did most of the HTML coding (since there weren't kid-friendly HTML editors readily available), the students had a say and did some of the work also, not just the designing. Barkhouse's experience was a really heartwarming project with her students that rewarded the students for their efforts; at the end of their design and coding, once their page was hosted and public, people sent them emails from around the world to say they had seen their site.
Another school, still pretty early in the internet game, tried something different. They made an interactive intranet so that student images and reports could be linked with what they were learning in class (Pitt, 2000). This project was meant to connect students to the topics they learned about in history, but it led the teacher in an unexpected direction given the enthusiasm of his students. He made plans to change his instruction in the future in order to develop his students' ICT (information and communication technology) skills by having the students learn to put their own work into the intranet and design the styles, links, and connections on the intranet. It was thought that this project could be expanded even further by moving from intranet to internet in order to connect learning in different subjects with students around the world.
Although the motivation of students to learn HTML is very interesting to me, it's also important to know how to effectively teach them. Organization is a very important aspect of HTML and not all students understand or organize things the same way. According to Merdivan and Ozdener (2011), there are several common metaphors used to teach students how to organize their HTML writing including: book, map, village, house, classroom, and travel. Some of these, such as the book metaphor, may be too linear for students to fully understand the HTML structure, whereas others may facilitate better learning (and others may be too non-linear). At the end of the study, Merdivan and Ozdener conclude that using a city metaphor to help students learn about the structure of HTML was the best for student success. This metaphor was structured and something that students were probably already familiar with, and it also led them to think about structuring their HTML and sites without becoming too linear or disorganized.
Of course, motivation and organization aren't the only parts of teaching (or learning) HTML. Luckily, in this day and age, there are plenty of resources available to get ideas, or tips and help, for both the student and the teacher!
Barkhouse (1997) leaves us with this thought about teaching students to write HTML:
Computer technology has the power to motivate children in unique ways. Their attention is actively engaged for longer periods of time and often at a higher level than many other activities in the classroom. This useful tool and motivator is solidly integrated into my classroom. Computers will not replace teachers, but they certainly will continue to change the ways many of us teach and learn.
References
Barkhouse, N. (1997). Grasping the thread: Web page development in the elementary classroom. Emergency Librarian, 24(3).
Merdivan, E., & Ozdener, N. (2011). Effects of different metaphor usage on hypertext learning. Behavior & Information Technology, 30(2).
Pitt, J. (2000). Computing on a shoestring: Extending pupils' historical vision with limited resources. Teaching History, 101.
No comments:
Post a Comment