TTWWADI

That's The Way We've Always Done It

I was hit this week with a TTWWADI right in my own teaching. It's the end of the semester and so in TTWWADI fashion the students are creating web sites using Dreamweaver.

The project includes everything we've been talking about this past semester. The only difference is the students have had a blog all semester and that is a web site.

The students have been excited to learn how to use Dreamweaver but I keep coming back to: Is this a skill I should be teaching in 6 and 7th grade?

Maybe...before Web 2.0 tools made it so easy to publish content to the web learning how to build a web page in Dreamweaver was a skill we needed to be teaching. But is it a relevant skill in a Web 2.0 world?

I would argue we should be teaching how to hack css scripts. All of my students have a blog through our school site. Most have at least one other site, either on facebook, myspace, or some other social-network. All of these places are created using .php and the users can hack their themes by changing values in the css script. I would have done this on our blogging system that is running wordpress mu but users can't hack into individual themes using this program.

This would concern me more if this wasn't the last year we will have "technology class" as starting next year we move to an embedded model where we will be supporting and teaching technology within content areas.

However..there are still many technology classes out there that are teaching web design via Dreamweaver. I'm not against web design...I could use a lesson myself, but we need to make sure that we are teaching students web design for a new web and not web design because TTWWADI.

Just something I've been thinking about.

[tags]TTWWADI[/tags]

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