Who?
My name is Joel Roggenkamp. I’m a third-year business teacher in Minnesota. I hold a B.S. in Business Computer Information Systems and an M.Ed. in Business and Industry Education. I’m an instrument rated pilot and worked as a software analyst in the aviation industry before beginning my teaching career.
When I got the chance to teach web design, I wanted to do it right. I didn’t want the students to become experts at following instructions and navigating Dreamweaver’s menus. I wanted the students to experience a higher level of control over their web pages, which can only be accomplished by coding pages by hand with XHTML and CSS.
(The first time I taught this class, the class spent 8 weeks hand coding in a text editor and the last four weeks using Dreamweaver. When we switched to Dreamweaver, I found to my surprise that the students hated it, and they ended up reverting back to Notepad++ when they thought I wasn’t looking!)
Sadly, the only textbook our school had was the kind that just showed students all of the menus in Dreamweaver so they could monkey around on the drag-and-drop interface without really learning any code. I didn’t touch the textbook once the whole year and ended up writing every single lesson, project, test, and rubric on my own.
The textbook market is full of books like this. There’s not much choice for teachers who want students to learn to code from scratch. My first two years of teaching were basically a death march, trying to stay one step ahead of the class, writing quality and relevant lessons. Now, in my third year, I have a little more time to breathe. It would be a real shame if all of the work I put in developing these quality lessons went to waste. I’m sure this stuff has got to be useful to other teachers, so I decided to put it all out on the web.
What’s with the copyright notice?
Unfortunately, the internet is not immune to theft. There are people who steal others’ content and claim it as their own. They rip off all of your content, put it on their own website, and plaster it with ads.
Read my thoughts on who really owns teacher-created lesson plans, my reasons for the copy restrictions, and my reaction to some feedback I’ve recieved.
Send Feedback!
Other teachers are my biggest source of ideas for improvement. If you have any suggestions for this site, please let me know! Simply use the feedback button on the right side of the page or contact me through email.
Find Me On The Web
Attendance Management System is software I wrote for student organizations to easily track attendance records. You can download it for free from my website.
Read my blog to stay up to date on developments with this site.
Follow me on twitter.
View my linkedin profile or my CV.
I offer professional web site design services for nonprofits and small businesses.
