One of the things we’ve struggled with this year’s Y11s is the Eportfolio. We’ve been using frames in Dreamweaver with students of all levels and many just don’t get the frameset idea. What is the frameset? Why is it called index? How do I open the plan page?
Ken said at Peacehaven they use a template file with a layout using tables. And I have been experimenting with this system with this years Y10s. The template file has the disadvantage that you have to know exactly the names of every page you need before you create the first page. The other disadvantage is wobble, a photo or large amount of text can open up a table and if the links are achored to the middle of the cell (the default) the links start to wobble.
The advantage of templates is that if you want to change the Plan page you open the plan page – simple. But if kids have an error in the template then correcting problems is painful because they have to re-make every page again. I can see teachers have to spend a lot of time fixing Eportfolios in this method too.
At the Assessing Unit 1 course the moderator (Bob Bishopp) did mention Incomedia’s WebsiteX5 as a better alternative to Dreamweaver. Given the man hours spent on this problem better software could well be a cost effective solution.
In the mean time, I’m favouring returning to frames.
please, please, please don’t use frames!!! They always cause hassle getting them to work – and they were only created as an unsuccessful hack to the html spec.
of course in industry the real question now is between CSS and tables for layout, but I don’t think that CSS will go down too well with kids (unless dreamweaver makes it easy – I’m not sure on that).
Templates in dreamweaver are EXCELLENT. It sounds though, like you may be misusing them. First make a template page with a 2×2 table. merge top cells to make a title (that doesn’t change), then left cell for links. Make the bottom right cell editable, and the others not editable.
Now when you make a new page you make sure that it is dependent (and created from) the template page. When you change the template (e.g. links or new title etc) dreamweaver asks you if you want to update the other pages, just click yes and all others update.
I found that dreamweaver sometimes went wrong, and the kids need to follow a number of steps very closely to get it to all work correctly, but the time spent on this (about 1-2 hours) is worth it as they then don’t have any problems with frames or an inconsistent site.
What I find weird about the e-portfolio is that as a teacher you could make a “portfolio creator” in something like php which let them chuck all the info into it, add some images in a standard size and then chucked out a perfect looking e-portfolio in a zip file. Given the difficulty of dreamweaver et al., I wonder how long it will be before people start doing this (and getting lots of marks for doing nothing).
James, thanks for your input. Its great to get some other people in to think about this issue.
You raise a numbe of points but my first question is, how do you make a cell in an html table non editable? And is it worth it making the template.htm a read only file, as a common error is to copy over and wreck the template.
actually, going and looking again at dreamweaver I think you just make cells editable – everything else is non-editable. Highlight the cell that will be editable, then insert>template objects>editable region. Save the template.
When you create a new page from the template make sure that the “update page when template updates” checkbox is ticked (otherwise the whole point of using a template is lost).
Now when you update the template – all the other pages happily update with it.
When you create a new template go to new template in dreamweaver (I think you might have to select html). The file is saved as dwt.
My gripe with dreamweaver was that about 10% of kids it seems to just randomly have problems with settings – that stop everything working. Also setting up a site with all the correct properties is a little tough to get the kids to do – and one wrong setting can muck it all up. A few kids didn’t select the update with template checkbox – so definately stress that one. In general I’d say that about 50% use dreamweaver perfectly with no problems. I got them to move onto making buttons in photoshop and then rollovers. While they were doing that I could give more help to the others with their problems.
Via Email from Lee O’Neil
date May 16, 2007 12:18 PM
subject RE: FW: FAO_rDrake_ICT[Scanned]
Try HTML Composer for making web pages/ePortfolios. Dreamweaver’s far too sophisticated.
…free and downloadable with Netscape Navigator/Sea Monkey