Can anyone recommend some good tools, websites, software, etc... for teaching very basic web design to fourth through sixth graders and seventh through ninth graders?
NVU (n-view) seems to be a good choice to introduce web design especially for 7th-9th grade. For the younger kids, if u are an all Mac environment I would go w/ iWeb which is very user friendly.
Webon and Jottit are super easy, but give you some freedom with embeds and code manipulation. Nvu is great. The semi-updated version of it is called Kompozer.
I think I'd take the teach them the basics approach and use Notepad and teach them HTML. Use something like http://www.htmliseasy.com/html_tutor/index.html to teach HTML and then if they get through all of that move on to teaching CSS or Javascript, etc.
This is great, I used to do my old district's web page and we use Plone which is an open source CMS. Before that we used pagemill and netscape composer so I really never had any experience w/ html. Then I come to my new district and they want me to be the web guy and they use Dreamweaver. So, basically I am using the GUI to maintain the page and work my way through using code, this will help me greatly.
does it still make sense to teach dreamweaver. i mean, these are young kids we are talking about and there aren't that many people who'd still go into html and dreamweaver to create a website. one of my dilemmas ...
I just saw this new site on Larry Ferlazzo's blog, and it is how to make web pages online and it's free. It uses Flash and is Beta, but u can do some really cool looking things.
If you are looking for some great resources tools and e-learning apps that will make your professional life a great deal easier check out my blog at www.edgalaxy.com with regular updates and lesson plans.