Course reflections Use Project pages for live examples

1. 
   eg Ibrahim Tawfeek's Privacy on the web for a good example of use of Blockquote and Superscript.
   

Other ideas:

• Have the class grade the projects done this year (2003) on a list of criteria in order to get them to critically assess other's web pages


• Need an application which will count the number of words in a given div or tr / td to assess length of writing


• Need an app which will take a list of tags / attributes and search for them in a page and return the numbers of each


• An app which will compare stylesheets and hook out the changed styles

Making my teaching of Excel better

General

This year (Fall 2003) students seemed to handle the different exercises better than last year.
There were complaints from overseas students about using baseball stats as an example spreadsheet since few people understood what the categories meant.

Improvements

1. Have the students download a text table or simple spreadsheet from a web site and format it
2. Learn how to format decimal places and round numbers
3. Use formulae that reference the previous line. Changing interest loans etc
4. Do more with scaling axes to fit
5. Do more with formatting the sheet and saving and using charts in web page.

Powerpoint thoughts

• Few groups seem to have grasped the idea of applying animations to the Master Slide. Need to hammer this one home.
• Good exercise of reducing the number of words on a couple of slides. Maybe some more exercises like this. Some students found this very difficult.
• Very few groups grasped how to do between slide transitions.
• Ideas for pedagogy:
  • "deconstruct" a powerpoint presentation. Students have to identify what has been changed. Do this as a class exercise and homework.
  • Go through the procedure to produce a slide-show; ie the design process. Need to know when to create the Master Slide and decide on transitions. Separate content from presentation.
  • More on Slide Notes and their utility
  • More on colours and colour schemes (hard in such a short time)
• Drop the class presentations? Are these really useful?
• Engaging content. Have students do PPT presentation on subject of choice and include own graphics. Possibily do in groups of two. I think I can generate a robust grading rubric to have students then grade each other's presentations. Especially good after they have already 'deconstructed' a presentation.