Teaching web design- do the students know more than the teachers?

From original discussion posting (nextgen teachers)

Our digital native student are becoming increasingly web literate. This has caused major curriculum issues- especially when it comes to web design. Students ( who even though they don't know what web 2.0 is) are used to the freedoms that this gives. They frequently have MySpace, Bebo and Piczo web sites that allow them to publish to the web freely and easily. This means that when they sit in an ICT lesson and are learning how to use applications software to create web pages- they start with enthusiasm and very quickly find it long winded and boring.

This is not to say that teaching web design is something that should not be considered and becomes irrelevant. As educators we can teach the features of good web design (especially layout, content and copyright issues) that can actually improve their presentation of out of schools content- teaching the skills that the students will use in their day to day web interactions. This provides masssive challenges to teachers:

At the Academy, we took the decision to allow our year 8 students to create their own MySpace style sites within our ICT lessons. We did this because, after a straw poll of students we found that whilst only 30% had access to the internet at home, 60% had some form of web site and 90% had visited these sites. This provided a massive opportunity, as using this theme not only placed our lessons within the students frame of reference, we also were able to personalise the learning experience for our learners.

We used Dreamweaver. We tried to ensure that the students included concepts like housestyle, standardisation and audience. We have had mixed success.The students attitude towards the work was and is fantastic and we had kids running to school in order to access computer rooms before school opened. It did allow us to cover parts of web design that we would not normally cover and it was a much more real experience. We had control. The learners where allowed to use the online features that are created for MySpace sites and thelike- this allowed learners to embed videos and introduce more interactive elements- we found http://www.musicjesus.com/ very useful as it provided the javascript that was required.

The problems where that some of the students still created things that were not suitable and we had lots of flashing glittery sites. It was also difficult for students to share their work and we were uncomfortable with the students uploading their sites to the internet- however, we did put a few on our intranet.

In the future I think we will ask the students to add content on some issues that are important to them- maybe includinjg some sort of environmental page to widen the amount of content included. However, the organic nature of what they produced demonstrated that they cared about their work- and it had a refreshing honesty- they didn't give me what I they thought I wanted, instead it was what they wanted- but using the skills I had taught them (because they could see that it made the end result better!) The student reaction to this was worth it and it is something we will explore further!