Web development is now one of the most competitive industries. Therefore, it is an incredibly desirable skill that many schools are starting to implement into their curriculum. There are also many ways to learn it with many platforms providing resources for teaching it.
However, which web development resource is the best for a teacher’s lesson plans?
Keep reading to learn what desirable qualities you should want in a web development lesson plan resource, what the best providers are, and more!
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What Is Web Development?
Web development is essentially the process that ends in the creation of a website. However, there are many individual elements involved in this, including:
- Designing the website layout
- Creating content for the website
- Implementing backend elements like databases
- Maintaining the website as a whole
As you can imagine, web development is often a complex process. In fact, web development is often divided into three layers: frontend development, backend development, and full-stack development. It takes time to learn just one layer, let alone all three (which full-stack is often the most demanded).
Thus, teaching students starting at the school level is important. It’s equally important to find the right resources given how complex the entirety of web development is.
What Should Teachers Look For In A Web Development Lesson Plan Resource?
Although you will likely want to research web development lesson plan resource providers immediately, you first need to know where to start. Therefore, you need to know precisely what to look for in a web development lesson plan resource.
There are several qualities that every web development teaching resource should have. Here are some critical ones.
It Should Be Easy For A Student To Understand
Finding a web development resource that is easy for your students to understand is the most critical aspect to focus on when conducting your research. If your students find the presentation style too complex or advanced, they won’t retain essential web development information.
Therefore, there are a few elements you need to look out for to find web development lesson plan resources that students can digest.
- The length: Ideally, you should look for resources that don’t overstay their welcome. They need to be full of content while not having any filler content that takes up too much time while not teaching anything important.
- Various difficulty levels: A massive downside of some web development lesson plan resource providers is that they focus too much on a singular ability level (entry-level, for example). Ideal lesson plan resource providers will be able to cater to multiple different age groups.
- The focus: Finding a web development lesson plan resource with a clear direction is critical. If the resource has too broad of a focus, the student is less likely to retain the teachings.
There Should Be Clear Web Development Lesson Objectives
Lesson objectives are the basis of a fantastic lesson plan. Therefore, when finding a lesson plan resource for web development, you should find one with clear lesson objectives – and that are ideally matched to the curriculum standards in your areas.
This can mean two things. First, it means focusing on a specific topic. You don’t want students to be learning frontend and backend together. Instead, there should be clear objectives for learning a focused topic.
Second, having clear matches to content curriculum standards. Teaching the entirety of web development for K12 students is impossible. So, making sure your content fits exactly what the curriculum says they need to know is often your best bet.
It Should Be Memorable By Being Fun
The final element to watch out for are web development resources that are eye-catching and fun. Dull and colourless designs and uninteresting content are a massive problem if you want to engage students and make them enjoy web development.
Additionally, you want content that goes beyond just describing tags or language syntax – students need to get their hands “dirty” with projects.
Therefore, you need resources that are colourful and interactive and teach web development in a fun or innovative way with projects students can expand and customize.
What Are The Top Web Development Lesson Plan Resources?
You now know what to look for in a top-quality web development lesson plan resource, but you may not know what resource types you want in a web development teaching resource package.
As mentioned, you need multiple web development lesson plan resources to convey lesson objectives to various ability levels effectively.
Here are the most compelling web development lesson plan resources types you’ll want to look at.
Introductory Web Development Courses For Entry-Level Students
The best way to introduce a class to web development is with a concise and engaging introductory lesson plan. You need a web development lesson plan resource that will be easy to understand and excitingly explain the basics of web development to engage students with the content.
However, because there are so many web development tools, you want a resource provider with as many introductory lesson plans as possible.
To example what we’re talking about, Zenva Schools has excellent introductory lessons for the three core languages that make up web development. Here are some of their best ones.
- Intro To Web Development With HTML and CSS: A course that combines two programming languages that focus on web development to create a brilliant introduction to it. It shows students how to create a website with paragraphs, headlines, lists, images, tables, links, forms, fonts, and more.
- Intro to Javascript: A course that introduces students to Javascript, a web development tool focusing on dynamically updating content, animating images, and more. Students can learn how to store data in multiple ways (variables, arrays, etc.), change data with various operators, conduct data evaluation with conditionals, use functions and loops to control logic, store data, and use the DOM API to modify web pages.
Web Development Projects
The natural next step for students after completing introductory lessons on web development is to start on some projects. Web development projects are perfect for teaching students to achieve goals using specific programming languages. However, keep in mind students should stick with frontend development first – as this is usually the most necessary skill.
There are many of these project-based courses on Zenva Schools you can look at for an example, such as:
- HTML & CSS Project – Responsive Website: A course that shows you how to create a responsive website while improving your skills with HTML and CSS. The course teaches students how to use HTML to create layouts, use the developer tools on Google Chrome, make a navigation bar, create grid formats to professionally display images on the site, create rules for varying screen sizes, and more.
- JavaScript Project – Language Learning Game: An extensive learning resource that teaches students how to create a language learning app using Javascript (it also uses HTML and CSS). The teachings in the JavaScript project include app structuring, user input detection, answer processing (correct and incorrect answers), and more.
Intermediate Web Development Courses
After completing introductory courses and experiencing some projects on web development, students will want to move on to intermediate classes that focus on more advanced web development features. This will especially be the case with older students who have probably used HTML since they were a pre-teen.
Just to provide an example again, Zenva Schools offers this with their “Intermediate HTML & CSS” course. This course dives a lot deeper into CSS and covers responsive design specifically. Students will learn more about how media query breaks work, and how to use popular methods like CSS Flexbox and CSS Grids.
What Lesson Plan Resource Providers Offer The Best Web Development Teaching Resources?
The final step to finding the best web development lesson plan resources is to compare the best providers. A brilliant web development teaching resource provider will offer a good amount of content selection covering multiple topics and ability levels.
Here are three high-quality web development teaching resources and what they can offer students and teachers.
Codecademy
Codecademy gives students and web development beginners multiple courses on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and more.
The primary focus of Codecademy is to teach with doing. Most of the lessons are organized around doing coding exercises in their in-browser code editor. However, their premium services include videos, cheatsheets, challenges, articles, and more. So, the variety of web development resources on the site is the standout element.
This being said, Codecademy offers limited resources for actual classroom use, and is not suitable for every type of learning style. Their emphasis on in-browser coding also doesn’t have the same utility for project construction.
htmlreference.io And cssreference.io
Both htmlreference.io and cssreference.io give detailed learning resources on HTML and CSS. These programming languages focus on web development and have excellent tools to create a high-quality website.
Additionally, they are free guides to get someone started on the sites, with brief explanations of the tools.
This being said, bear in mind this site is built more like technical documentation than a full-learning resource. While students will get to see the various tags or CSS properties, there’s not particularly any exercises to do. Plus, the site also doesn’t really have JavaScript – another important language for web development.
Zenva Schools
As mentioned, Zenva Schools is a resource provider with detailed and exciting web development resources.
They focus on courses with multiple difficulty levels to provide a sense of progression for students. Additionally, the lesson plan resources on the site contain numerous types of content, including videos, interactive tasks, quizzes, text-based lessons, and more.
All the courses are made to be fairly project-based, so students get to learn by doing with practical applications as well.
Beyond this, though, it’s worth noting Zenva Schools was built to be used in schools. So beyond the content itself, it comes with useful teaching tools like classroom management, student reports, and pre-mapped lesson plans for different curriculum standards. So the whole package is here!
Plus, with content in other topics, it’s a good value for the price.
Which Web Development Lesson Plan Resource Provider Is The Best One?
All in all, the best web development lesson plan resource will depend on what you want as a teacher. There are plenty of options out there to help put together your curriculum, so be sure to shop around.
This being said, don’t forget to take a look at Zenva Schools. Zenva Schools has a thorough collection of web development resources for teachers to use in the classroom. With other tools perfectly suited for classroom use as well, it’s extremely easy to incorporate into the classroom no matter your teaching style as well.
Whatever you choose, though, web development will provide students with useful skills far into the future – especially in the face of the growing internet sphere.