Final Exam

Web 2 Final Exam is below. Choose the assignment appropriate for your topic.

Be sure to save final copy properly in UDrive before the bell rings for your exam. TEST IT!!!

You are the editor of the Missouri Times. It is November 7, 2006. Your state is the only state that the Northern Democrats won. Your state has played a strong role in the slavery debate through the Missouri compromise and that information is important to your readers (and is perhaps why they voted for Douglas).
Prepare a breaking news website that reflects the results of the election.

You are the editor of the Capulet Times. You have just heard that Juliet may have died and Romeo is missing. Your newspaper is owned by the Capulet family.
Prepare a breaking news website that reflects this news.

You are the webmaster for the Madrid Times. It is July 2, 1898. You have to be as objective as possible, but you know the King of Spain reads your paper and has huge influence.
Prepare a breaking news website that reflects the events of July 1.

You are the editor for the Chicago Tribune. It is August 27, 1968 and the Democratic Convention is experiencing more and more protests. Many of your reporters sympathize with the protesters and you support the free speech of the protesters. However, many of your readers think the police are correct to “restore order”.
Prepare a breaking news website that reports the growing protests at the convention.

End of Marking Period

OK. This is the end of the marking period. Things will move very fast today and tomorrow.

1. Turn in your exam. Click here for directions. Leave time for this. You could do the writing at home, but I must get the exam evaluation before midnight on Tuesday. No evaluation--no grade.

2. Check teacherease for errors. I make mistakes. I will not accept late work, but I want to fix errors. Your responsibility to check.

3. Amnesty program was posted on March 15. If you are going to participate any work must be submitted by 2pm on Tuesday.

I have 100 of these exams to check so please try hard to get them submitted correctly. Since I extended the deadline because of snow I am in a bit of a time crunch. Help eachother!!!

Exam Observations

A few notes that I see about the exam:

1. Many of you should be using tables to help with your layout (review Florida Parks pages). Many of your layouts look a little sloppy. A table would help a lot. Remember, the table can have no border, but you use it just for alignment.

2. Many of you have images, but they don't have alternate text or VSpace or HSpace. This looks bad.

3. In general your backgrounds are way too prominent. They are backgrounds. You need to remove them. If you take the background out and your page suddenly looks cleaner, that should tell you something. In general your pages are way too busy. Again, it is VERY rare to find a professional website that has a dark background or one that is as flashy as some of yours are. The best looking websites I've seen for this exam are very clean, and have minimal, if any, backgrounds.

4. This is a website. Not an essay.

5. Citations must be correct. Everything must be cited and you must know who wrote your information. "Some guy" is not an acceptable answer.

6. Test your site! Have someone else try it out. Is it fun?? This is a a factor for your grade!!!! Will a 5th grader want to use your website?? I urge you to look at your classmates work for ideas.

7. You must link to a prominent blog on the subject.

Exam Thoughts

As you finish the research for your exam I wanted to have some Do's and Don'ts:

DO:

1. Look at information with a critical eye. Just because it is on the internet does not mean it is correct. How did you determine that it is valuable information? Who is the author? Is their work cited in other places?

2. Remember your designated audience!! Do 5th graders want a boring site? No! Do you include interactive elements like quizzes, video, surveys?

3. Be very specific. Don't start writing about irrelevant issues. Also, be sure you define the question correctly. For example, "can dogs love humans" will require a definition of what "love" is. Dogs can be devoted, but can they love? These are tough questions.

4. Be sure to only use work that is Creative Common license or non-copywrited.

5. Collaborate with your classmates!! It would be cool to link two or three sites together, each tackling a different part of the issue. Help each other with video, cool ideas, etc... I have no problem if you barter skills ("I work on your video, you help me with the images") as long as you cite who did what. Use blogmeister to connect with anyone in the world. You must have a blog reference. Blogmeister has students all over the world who could leave you comments!!!

6. Include a professional looking page of references.

DON'T:

1. Don't use dark backgrounds unless you have a REALLY good reason. Dark backgrounds are VERY rare in the design world. Plan your website BEFORE you start on the computer. Don't just jump in.

2. Don't wait until the last minute.

3. Don't do less than your best work. These WILL be used by the 5th graders in Seymour. Show that you know what you are doing.

Exam

Your marking period exam is posted here on the class wiki. It is due April 2, which will close the marking period.

You also have your chapters to complete. Yes, I am asking you to do two things at once. Your exam should reflect your current knowledge and you should use the tools that you have to solve the problems in the exam.

Book project 4 is about frames. This is a very quick project. Please do the following:

1. Parks
2. Student Trips
3. Outline/Summary
4. Quiz

You will do the same four categories for project 5.

Exam Summary

Exams are over. I have 1-2 student taking exams tomorrow. Grades are on teacherease.com

Summary exam averages:
Period 1: 84.6
Period 2: 79.4
Period 4: 82.4
Period 5: 82.2
Period 6: 81.5

A few notes:

Memo: The number one problem was not following the format. This made your memos very unclear. Some of you turned in an entire page without using paragraphs. Second, how long should a one page memo be? Why would you turn in a second page?

Those of you who included evidence from readings, thank you! I was surprised more of you didnt talk about the $100 laptop we read about.

HTML: Some very good websites. Some of you get too creative with colors. Less is more. But overall you understand this very well.

Vocab: Some of you nailed it. Some of you needed to study.

Final Exam: Web1

Today we will begin our final exam.

Rules for exam:

1. Do your own work. No questions, or outside assistance.
2. You may use your book and code files for the memo and HTML section.
3. You can only use your printed outlines for the HTML section.

Be sure to follow directions and turn work in properly.

Stay quiet for the entire exam period.

Click here to visit the exam. The vocabulary link will only be active during the exam period.

Final Exam

Your final exam will start next week. I wanted to encourage you to study. The exam will have three parts.

1. Vocabulary. You will need to understand the basic terms from our HTML book (Intro-Chapter6). I will only include the more basic terms (no tricks). You can use your outlines that you created for this part of the exam (you can print them out). No books. (20pts)

2. One page memo. You should practice the one page memo. You will be presented with a problem and you will be asked for solutions. Your answer should reflect that you did the readings this semester. Again, study the format and review the readings. Books and computer OK, no human help. 30pts.

3. HTML creation. You will create a basic HTML web site that will reflect the coding you learned this semester. You should be able to code frames, image maps, forms, links, and any other HTML code from the first six chapters. Your pages should reflect accessability and usability standards. Books and computer OK, no human help. 40pts.

4. Network navigation. This section is for the remaining ten points. If you label your files correctly and follow directions for turning the work in you will get full credit for this. No books, computer, or human help. 10pts.

Most of you will need more than the allotted time for the exam. I will post the exam early so you can start early. I haven't figured out exactly how to do that yet, but I hope to work on it today.

Any problems with grades or missing work will close this Friday. Follow the procedure on the board. I will grade final projects Tuesday. I hope to post how to submit your projects soon. This will be a ton of stuff for me to grade, so make it easy for me by having everything done correctly and on time. Remember, I will post your exam grades immediately to teacherease.com.

A few project notes:
1. Check the rubrics. Make sure you are following the assignment.
2. Much of the HTML isn't working (the java scripts). I thought we had solved it Friday, but we didnt. I'm working on it...
3. Movies should be saved as movie files (not projects) and put in UDrive for comments. Put comments on directors blog. Do not use copyrighted images or music. Use the open source stuff or create (gasp!) your own. Free sound clips.

We made a downloaded music folder in the UDrive. When you download clips or music put them there, then copy to WDrive for your project. This way we can help each other find things. Be sure to use folders to categorize items!!

Technorati Tags: web+design+exam

Tuesday

We are finishing the second part of our sample exam today. Some of the pages are very impressive. I think all of you did well once you sat down and tried to solve the problem. Today we will evaluate the projects and look at our classmates work. I think you will be impressed by how far we have come.

You will need to do this on the exam without any assistance. If you need to practice, start now.

I think our class is getting a lot of reading world wide which is cool. Check the clustrmap on this page and on the blogmeister. You should all have a clustrmap on your blogs. Let me know if you try to insert one (I have to upload it). Those of you who are still skeptical about EVERYTHING must recognize how the dynamics of the class change now that people realize we are being monitored world-wide.

I think this is my first movie post of the year but vacation is coming up and I wanted to update my movie picks. With a baby at home, its hard to keep up.

Movies I have seen recently: (stars out of five)
Casino Royale: Three stars (first scene was five stars)
Da Vinci Code: One star. (horrible....)
This is Spinal Tap: Five stars
The Departed: Four stars (rough movie, not for kids).
The Break-Up: Four stars (Mrs. Schneider says-5 stars)

Movies I want to see:
Pursuit of Happyness
Good Shepherd
Rocky Balboa

Exam

I hope that the totally 10 system is working for you. I think allowing students to choose the assignments that fit their needs is the way to go. Some of you resist the challenge, but I urge you to truly explore the possibilities. Although the process has been a bit messy as we experiment I am very impressed by how fast some of you have worked when some of the restrictions of a traditional classroom are lifted.

I have begun formulating the semester exam. This will be a serious exam as it carries so much weight in the grading system. Currently I envision a vocabulary exam (20%), a web page creation (50%), and an analysis (30%). I encourage you to have quality outlines as I expect they will come into play during the exam.

Do you have suggestions for the exam? Topics? Ideas? If so, leave them here.

Project 6 due Thursday.

Exams

Almost all of your exams are due. Barring extreme situations there will be no more extensions.

1. Print out the grading sheet in U:drive.
2. Print out projects and evidence (follow directions on sheet).
3. Print out and self assess rubric.
4. Compile exam in order. Complete grading on first sheet.
5. If your due date is later than today (only a few of you) you will work outside of classtime or when done with your project work. We start project six tomorrow.

I think this worked fairly well. The process was a bit messy, but I will make some changes for next time. I think having choices allowed many of you to explore some new things.

Project Six is about forms. We will only touch on this briefly as this language is rarely used anymore. But I think it is important to recognize the structure and purpose of forms. I am not exactly sure where we will go the last 6-7 weeks of the class. I need to coordinate with the other classes as I have all the Web Design II students. I know we have caught up to them at this point.