What should students learn about web design?

When teachers have students design multimedia projects of any type, questions that address how the students spend their time are important. The most basic question is whether the time spent working on a design project offers some unique experiences or benefits in contrast to more traditional learning tasks.

If the teacher feels the time spent on the project will be beneficial, we feel it is important to evaluate the costs/benefits of time spent on multimedia authoring. Will students have to learn how to use a new type of software? If the project involves the development of web pages, there is always the option of creating simple pages by using a word processing program and saving the file in HTML format.

If the decision is to commit to web design tools and to create the web site following web design principles, at what level will students be expected to master web design principles and in turn what skills will be required to implement these design principles? We attempt to list the skills and principles we feel are essential throughout the book. Remember, our emphasis is on the integration of technology in content area instruction and not on classes in which the goal is to develop technology or design skills.

If you have spent time in the computer section of nearly any book store, you will encounter an impressive number of books on the topic of web design. Here is a challenge. What would you include in a web design book written for eighth graders? Recently, we issued a similar challenge to a group of my students. They created a web site providing what they felt middle school students should know to create web pages for their classes.