Tom’s Super Blog!

This has just been an adventure in itself, coming into the project I thought I  was doomed and would never get any work done bt i actually found quite the oppisite.  I liked the project alot and this has been the best learning experience i have ever been apart of. I enjoy the fact that I will probaly use this in the future and I am gald that I took the class.

Thanks you Mr. Stengle and make sure to always make good choices.

In this past week of May 1st- the 7th i have learned many new things while working with my new edublogs site.  I become an exprert on blogging and how to add pages and post pictures but i really toned my skills on how to make my edublogs site look snazzy.  I added new widgets and updated my blog roll. 

We also started working with our advisors in creating our edublogs for their praticular needs. I am working with the basketball coach in making a wedsite that players can check and use to find out pratice times, look up roster information and other useful information to benefit the team. 

The project is over, done, complete totally finished nothing else to do…….or so i thought. Coming into clas si was extatic knowing that the project was finally over. Mr.. Stengle had other ideas. yeah all the embedding and all the content was done with but what wasnt was the letter that we had to write to our advisors.

We were told to write a six paragraph letter on different topics to give our teacher a little synopsis on what the website will be dealing with. We explained the dashboard on edublogs and everything that they needed to know about how to work it.  We explained things such as hot spots and usability of the site and different widgets that we added to the blog tomake it better.

Finally we added about what part of the site we were most proud of and I said I was most proud of the content on the History of the Globe page and The History of Shakespeare page. If you are interested in the site I am talking about come check it out

Edublogs.com has open many new windows and this past week of our community projects has been a great one. I started by adding a video onto the site and making a page dedicated to videos. I first struggled with the videos not being able to find a site that gave the embedding code for my site.

I finally found one using mefeedia.com where the video had a simple embed video on the top right corner. I found a video on shakespeare and his life, it also took me a while to find this video because many of the videos were not in english and were irevelant to what I was looking for. 

After embedding the video I tried many times to re-size the video but every time I tried to do this the video would no longer played so I had to stay content with the size.  After creating the page I was happy because there was finally a video on the site and I know watching a video is a lot better than reading.

We have finally finished the edublogs website for our advisors. I worked with Mr. Baldwin and I made him an English blog for his freshmen English classes. Check it out I have learned so much from this project and taking this class this year.  Coming into the class I was pessimistic about what would be going on and how much the work load would affect my other academic classes.  It was an extreme work load but it has really helped come up with a new understanding of technology and the work load that comes with it. I never knew what a hot spot was or an rss feed or even a widget this class has taught me all of this.  I could never embed a video onto a site that I had and I never even had a site until this class came along!

Making this new paragraph is something that I have learned in this class.  Making everything in one large entry makes it harder on readers and pushes them away from reading such a long entry.  Spacing after ever 4 or 5 sentences shortens it up and makes it better to read. 

I have completed many things working in this class all year, I am probably most proud of my advisors site and the work I did to complete that.  Adding all the content and all the code it took to make everything fit perfectly made that task hard but in the end enjoyable.  Adding the voki, homework calendar and the literary quote of the day were hard tasks, resizing them to fit in side bars and on the pages properly.  I also like the text only portion of the site. 

I am also proud of our group tutorials that we completed. I worked with jack and mary two people I hardly knew anything about and at the end of the project we were closer because we worked so hard together.  We had many laughs during the project because of all the words I stumbled across while trying to record the tutorial. In the end we got it done and it came out great.

I never knew about the program we used called encoder and how you could record tutorials with that. It was probably the most interesting thing that I learned because I had seen many tutorials but never really understood how they were made.  I am now glad that I know this skill for projects in the future. 

Once class is over it will be a sad day.  Even though the work load was large I still came to class everyday with the mind set that would learn something and everyday I left here knowing something new.  I have never taking a class so grueling and demanding but it has made me a better student and I actually come to class and enter a zone where I just don’t wont to stop working and once the bell rings its almost a bittersweet feeling of not wanting to stop. 

You can view my personal site at www.tomf.edublogs.org and the work I have done, I am looking forward to using what I have learned in the future.

This is the final week of our project. We have been designing an edublogs site for weeks now and we have just finished up design and usability week! We are now learning how to use polls and surveys using www.polldaddy.com. In the last week work has been hectic and everyone is going 100 miles an hour trying to get everything they need to get onto their site.

Putting certian things in hot spots, final reflections and our 5 pages of content have been a challenge for us this week. I believe that I have handled this very weel and I am up to date with everything. I am looking foward to working more with Mr. Baldwin teaching him how to use the site!