Creating Portfolios

Our first project in the course is to create personal portfolio templates.

My students develop a basic website as a portfolio for showcasing the Graphic Design and Multimedia projects that they develop in the class. The last time I taught this class, I had them set up a template in Dreamweaver using a tables layout. This time I am having everyone use external linked CSS stylesheets to control all the page formatting and layout for their template. This gives a lot of control, but its a deeper learning curve than using HTML tags to set the appearance.

I have learned some great things from my students. Collectively, they have a tremendous amount of knowledge and skills, and they are enthusiastic about developing their projects. I now know about the shortcut keys for controlling font size in Firefox (hold down CTRL while scrolling the wheel). I learened that there are firefox add-ins for viewing and editing css styles, and there is a color picker add-in for selecting the exact hex code for any pixel on a web page. I also learned that the newest version of Dreamweaver is much better about editing css styles, but it has a much different layout than the older versions with which I am more familiar.

My students are very good at following complex oral directions as I show them how to perform tasks using the multimedia projector.

I am really excited about teaching this class this semester, but I have my work cut out in learing how to do a lot of things differently.