Kayleigh’s Blog

This year in online communications I learned a lot. One of the things that I learned that I always think about when I visit a website are hotspots. I always notice when things could be put in a better place to get users attention or when something catches my eye because it is in a hotspot. For example, I’ve noticed that that logins for different pages aren’t always in hotspots and I think they should be because I beleive finding a login spot is important. That is the reason that on my advisors blog i tried to use hot spots for the most important things. Also even though its not very hard I think that I learned a lot about widgets. When class first started I didn’t even know what a widget was, now I know how to put one on a webpage and how to find a specific one that I want to use for a page. For example, I used pages such as google gadgets and widgetbox to add things to my advisors page. I think these skills helped me to create good blogs for the class.

I will definately use somethings from class after school. I really enjoyed making the page so I might make my own one day and use things such as widgets and the voki on it.

The one project I enjoyed the most was the group tutorials. I liked it because i put a lot of hard work into it and I think it came out well. The reason I was so impressed with my work on this was because I didnt have the best group and I had to put in a lot of effort on my own. Also I learned how to use new things such as encoder and also publisher which we did the tutorial on.

All in all I enjoyed this class even though I did bad and wasn’t all too interested in the subjects that we learned. I don’t really think web design and computer skills are somthing I’m good at so I really couldn’t stay focused or interested but once I learned how to do certain things I enjoyed them.

This week while working on my teacher blog I deleted all of my pages. Mr. Stengel had pointed out that it would be easier to turn some of the pages into categories and write everything as a post. I really agreed with this and started to delete the pages and add categories on my blog. Also this week I created a poll for Mrs. Sheppards students. I made it on the spanish soap opera Zarabanda that we watch in class. Students seem to like that part of her class so I thought it would be something fun and interesting that would catch students interest to keep them on the page.

Seeing as this week is going to be the final week the only thing i have to be working on is transfering all of the information onto the page. I also need to find or create a video that will show Mrs. Sheppard how to work the page and google calendar. 

Since its the final week I’m kind of sad that I wont be able to make everything perfect for her but maybe next year i can come back and visit and help her update!

This week in class we didn’t have much time to work on new things. We really only met twice because there was a physics day feild trip, senior skip day, and then a day when Mr. Stengel was out.

During those few days we worked on our teacher blogs and also learned how to add a few things to our personal blogs. We made a chart on our portfolio page to show all of our progression in links. Also we went and used this website called odiogo to make all our our posts into audio. This way instead of reading everything you could just click and listen to the posts.

Even though there wasnt much done this week time wise, I feel as though the changes we made were very important to the usability of our blogs.

This week I feel like I haven’t progressed as much as the others. I got a few things done such as finding new widgets but overall I think that the week didn’t go very well. I found a few widgets i plan on keeping on my page such as a Salvador Dali art of the day, a translator for the page, and a word by word translator. I also decided to get rid of a few of my pages because the top has beeen seeiming crowded.

One thing I have been worried about is how to get all the content on the page with it still looking alright. It is a major issue but I’m not too worried about it because I really think I can find a solution soon.

By next week I am planning on getting all my information on the pages, and also putting my pictures on. I know I’m behind on this so it is at the top of my list of things to do.