Why Every Educator (and Student) Should Know HTML (and 5 Free Ways to Learn It If You Don't Already)

written by Andrew Coy.


Every educator and student should know HTML.

To me, this is the digital equivalent of saying: "Every student should be able to write an essay." And in truth, their are a lot more similarities between these two than differences. An essay is nothing more than a mode of communication -- an attempt to convince, prove, or at least argue a point of view. A blog post (in many ways) is an abbreviated, relaxed, at times more personal, and more interactive younger brother to the essay. Interestingly enough, however, whereas an essay has an audience of 1 (the teacher) -- a blog post has an audience of potentially millions physically anywhere.

And blog posts are written in HTML, which makes using HTML the equivalent of knowing how to use Microsoft Word (or OpenOffice, or Pages, etc.). HTML is how you put your thoughts on digital paper. And as this blog suggests, teaching is possible without paper -- a fact society is demonstrating every day in more areas than just teaching.

But if you have missed opportunities, have yet to get around to it, or simply haven't know where to start learning HTML, then now is a good time to change that.

HTML has been around since the web -- in fact, HTML is the web. Tim Bernes-Lee proposed the idea in 1989, created the framework shortly thereafter and over the past 20+ years it has proved to be the most flexible, simple, and enduring means of organizing the web. As Wikipedia puts it, "HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites."

The good thing about HTML is that everyone who uses it, puts things out on the web -- which means there are nearly endless amounts of resources at your disposal. I have highlighted 5 ways you can start learning HTML for free.

W3Schools.com

W3Schools.com is how I started learning HTML. Their site is a bit cluttered with advertisements perhaps, but nothing outdoes their Try it yourself » feature. They understand that there really is no better way to learn than by doing. And at each step of learning HTML W3Schools does a great job of breaking it down with "Try It Yourself" examples. Similarly, their reference section is also excellent. I still find myself there on a regular basis when I have a question. And if you get into more coding, their CSS, PHP, JAVASCRIPT, ASP, and SQL tutorials are also worth a visit.

WYSIWYG

If you have a blog (such as Blogger, WordPress, or the like) than you know that they have typically made it is easy to bold or underline text with a simple button. You may have also noticed there is usually a tab to toggle between "Compose" mode and "HTML" mode. The great thing about this is that you can learn HTML simply by going back and forth -- changing one thing in the "Compose" (WYSIWYG) mode and and then looking to see the HTML code behind it.

Online Books

If you are the type that just wants it spelled-out in a book, there are plenty of options for you. You don't even have to leave your computer or spend any money. Simply use something like Google Books to find one that is free. I found this "Basic Guide To HTML" by Jesse Dallas without much trouble at all (just limit your search to those with "full view only" to narrow your results). is a very simple to follow, thorough, and surprisingly not outdated option.

YouTube It

Put the power of YouTube to work teaching you how to code HTML. It's easy; is great for the visual learners; and will make sometimes complex steps much simpler to understand. While there is certainly a lot more out there in text, and the text is much easier to search and use as a quick reference, sometimes there is nothing better than watching someone else walk you through the steps while explaining them to you in plain english.
(another example video)

Friend / Library Finally, if nothing I've suggested works for you, find a friend, check out your local library, or see if there are classes near where you live. Maybe you just need someone right there explaining it, or a book to hold, or a class to make you accountable to someone.

Conclusion

The great thing about learning HTML is that it empowers you to put your ideas out there in front of the world while simultaneously freeing you from the confines of the little buttons on any given website. You can resize images, add tables, change font colors, and do whatever else you want all with simple commands that don't take too much to learn. Once you have learned HTML, your ideas do not need to be confined to the single-space Times New Roman with 1.25 inch margin defaults that the essay was before you learned how to use Word/OpenOffice/Pages.

Bring the Web into the physical world

Read Wes's post this morning about watching TV on your iPhone and it got me thinking.

Now that we can receive the stuff we used to sit in a living room together with other people to watch individually on the cellphone in our pocket, it's time to figure out how to bring the stuff on the cell phone in our pocket back to communal physical experience.

Twitter ain't enough. Getting CNN on yr iPhone certainly ain't enough.

I want us to push for the next step: personalized mobile networked 3-D projection. It's high time to bring the Web into the physical world.

What does this look like? How would it work?

I have no idea.

So let's do it.

On Big Ideas

Scott Marion from Center for Assessment in response to a question I posed during an Education Sector discussion on the 'Beyond the Bubble' report. My question concerned the wisdom in focusing our ed tech energies on creating assessments that focused on current content and assessment achievement rather than using the more holistic and community focused methods offered by Web 2.0 assessment to prepare students better for an unsure future.

There is no question that we need to prepare students for things for which we don't even know about yet. But we can't do that by guessing at the content that is coming in the future. Rather, we need to ensure that our current educational approaches focus on the big ideas of the disciplines (because these big ideas do not change that fast!) and on the process by which students develop expertise in these disciplines as well as the skills to continuing their learning when faced with novel situations.

While I totally agree that it is illogical to 'guess at content' coming in the future, it is by no less means ill-advised to think that 'big ideas do not change that fast'. The argument hinges on what type of ideas we consider.

Take for instance Latin. Latin admittedly hasn't changed much in a while. But the way in which Latin literature is thought about has changed in the most drastic way over the last few years.

Consider: it was the critical practice of Structuralism that had one of the most profound effects on the way that we think about 'close reading' no matter what discipline we teach. In Latin, 'close reading' means taking a single detail -- an image, a word, a manner of speech -- and tracing its use throughout the corpus of either a single work, the work of a single author, a school of authors, or with regard to all of extant Latin literature. A great example is in this essay by Barbara Gold on the issue of the image of the rose and how it relates to time and nature in Horace's poetry. To make a long story short (and with apologies) Gold tracks each time Horace uses 'rose' imagery in his poetry. She then looks for patterns in that usage, finding that his mentions of roses usually accompany thoughts concerning time and nature. And she makes her case for why the poet does this. This is a model close reading and each year I present it as an example of such to my students.

While I will not attempt to make any assumption as to the way in which Prof. Gold goes about her close reading, a technological marvel born at Tufts University makes this whole way of working a whole lot more accessible than back in the 1950's and 60's of Structuralism's beginnings.

That device is The Perseus Project.

Wide-ranging in scale, the interesting aspect of the project for me as a Latin teacher is the section dedicated to hyperlinked Latin texts. From Ovid to Tacitus, each text is chunked into small bits. Each word of each text is then hyperlinked to an online Latin/English dictionary and morphology/grammar tool. From a Latin I perspective, this gives students that ability to work through much more difficult passages of authentic Latin than they ever would be wont to otherwise. For the upper-level students, it presents a unique opportunity to take on scholar-level philological work.

How does it work? Well, say I give the students the word 'ignis' meaning 'fire' and tell them to look up each time the word appeared in the Aeneid. Within seconds, following easy directions which link the hyperlinked words in the dictionary to every use of the word in not only the text at hand, but also to every use of the word in the individual author's work as well as in the whole corpus of Latin literature, the student now has a complete list of every use of the individual word. This used to take WEEKS to do. Now it takes seconds. So the student can focus on finding the patterns, making connections, and analyzing the variety of 'meanings' the poem offers rather than the mind-numbing task of going on a word-search.

The Perseus Project has not changed Latin. But it has changed the way in which Latin is studied and analyzed. In this case the 'big idea' is the idea of 'critique' itself. Kant spent quite a while working on that one. So did Barthes. And Derrida. I don't mind my students working amongst that august company.

Ideas will change quickly. They are changing quickly. It's just that it's not always either the 'idea' or the 'change' that we expect. That's more and more the nature of a world where so many people with so many individual brains are working together at the same time all the while connected by the Net.

We need to teach kids how to think about how big ideas DO change and often change quickly. And that kind of meta-thinking -- which is ever evolving and will never come to a fixed 'conclusion' -- is best supported by the types of tools available in changeable, customizable, flexible, and holistic Web 2.0 apps and interactive Internet media as well as the types of tools good teachers have always used: Socratic Method, conversation, and compassion.

One last thing... this Perseus Project method is just one lesson. It teaches the kids a certain way to look at literature. Over the course of the four years I have most of my Latin students, we look at a wide range of critical styles and to practice each of them, we look at a broad range of content. Breadth of content and methods of analysis and understanding need not be at odds with one another, just as liberal arts and technology need not be at odds with one another. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can get to worthwhile teaching.

What will 'thinking' look like?

A reader writes:

I am completing my Thesis on the effects of Digital Media in the classroom and prediction of what it will be like in 5 years.

I am excited when I look at what's going on in academia with regards to education and technology. I think, as a rule, tech/ed and ed/neuro are the best things going in ed school classrooms right now.

As for five-year predictions, let's just say that my cellphone is more powerful than the laptop I had five years ago. Predictions are such a tricky thing in this environment. In general I think rather than predicting what classrooms will look like and how they will work in the future, it's more exciting to think about what people will 'think' like in the future. Because what history tells us over and over again is that more than anything else, technology -- whether papyrus or the printing press or the Internet -- allows for the distribution of fresh ideas and new ways of thinking about ideas.

What will those ideas look like?