Alyssa’s Blog

Earlier in the week we learned how to add the text only link to our blog.  This page contains no graphics and is simply contains edublog material with just text.  The benefit of having the text only link on our page is to have the text laid out for readers who are interested in looking at text only.  For example, on my page I have a voki and when you click on the text only box the voki wont show on the site.  It will have just text which contains the code that I used to put my voki on my page.

Throughout the week I have been talking to my advisor, Ms. Liberman.  I am helping her create a edublog for her history classes.  We have been e-mailing each other a few times this week.  I sent her my ten questions and she will be sending me the answers soon.  I also met with her this week because she had trouble logging in.  The trouble with her logging in happened to be she thought the letter L was the number 1.

This week I started to begin to work on Ms. Liberman’s blog.  I haven’t done too much, but I have created a few pages, but not put any text on the pages.  Some of the pages that I have created for her are about me, frequently asked questions, and a schedule page which will contain what classes she has and the times of the classes.  I also have set the theme as Mandingo, since I liked working with this theme with my own page.  I hope to see more progress with my ad-visors page with in the next week.

Yesterday in class we learned about user access.  We used this website  and I learned how to add someone to my blog as an administrator.  By adding someone as another administrator it allows them to have access to all the administration features.  From reading this page, I also had learned about editors, authors, contributors and subscribers.  This reading has given me a better understanding of roles on my blog.

Overall I think this was a pretty good week.  I plan on creating more depth on my advisors page next week and I plan on to keep learning more things to use with my page.

From reading the webpage hot spots article I learned that certain areas on a page attract readers attention more than others.  Hot spot number one is in the top left hand corner of your web page.  This part of a page must be used wisley because in the article it states the readers read from left to right and top to bottom.

After reading this article I have many some changes to my blog.  Since hot spot number one is located in the top left, I put what I feel is most important on that side of the page.  Three of the main widgets that I put on the top left were: Meta, my posts and my voki.

Meta is important to have in the hot spot because it is where you can click to go back to the main edublog site.  Sometimes it is annoying to hit the back button so I think that this will be less stressful to have it here.

My posts are also another important widget to have in hot spot number one.  One of the main ideas of having a blog is to show my reactions of my online communication class.  Posts will let readers know what is going on and what I am learning in class.

The voki that I create in class is something I feel is important to have along with Meta and my posts.  It lets readers not see, but hear a voice and they can get a feel for what to do on the page.

I put all of these three in hot spot number one because I think that they are important to have there and I find that they will help the viewers of my page enjoy my page more.

This week in class I believe that we got a lot done.  In the beginning of the week we created voki’sfor our page.  I liked working with the voki and from this we learned how to put the code on our page, which was located under the widgets, which is located under presentation.

Another thing that I learned this week was how to add a link when I am writing a post on my blog.  By adding links in your posts, it gives readers and your audience a way to get a feel for what your talking about.

Lastly, this week we started to start talking about our projects.  Mr Stengel created the pages for our advisors.  Working on this project I think will help me become more independent and I will learn a lot about developing websites.

I believe that the girls and boys who made the video of Victoria Lindsay getting beat up were not doing it for attention.  When youtube videos are watched you can usually tell if it is staged or not, but I saw a video clip of Victoria getting beat up and it didn’t look staged. 

From researching on the web, I saw a possible reason on yahoo why Victoria got jumped.  When I researched about her, I found out that she had posted “trash talk” on her myspace page, which had caused the attack of the six girls.  Another thing I learned from looking on this page was that there were two boys involved in the incident.  The two boys that were involved were the look out making sure no one would find out about the attack.

One way that our society can reasonably ensure that online communication technologies are not used to bully and harm others is to have stricter computer usage.  I think that parents in a way are responsable for their childrens actions.  What type of parent would let their child put up a video up on youtube of a girl getting jumped?  What has society come to?

Another way to help out this situation is to not let certain shows on television air.  Shows such as Jackass and other stupid and pointless shows on MTV can have an impact on what teens are doing today in the world. 

Videos causing violence on youtube should come to an end to ensure that online communication technologies are not used to bully and harm others.  Since several of videos are submitted on youtube everyday, I think it is harder to keep track of what ones are appropriate or not for the site.  Youtube should find a better way to monitor these videos or they should just shut down their site.

I think that this was a very tragic event to happen to Victoria.  Although it is said that she was “trash talking” no  one deserves to get jumped for a reason like that.

In conclusion, I think that youtube should have never let a video like this be allowed to be put up on their site and when they saw it they should have done something about it in the first place.

I don’t really have a view on the benefits of online interactions for teens out weigh danger.  I think that teens are responsible for everything they do on the computer.  If they are looking for danger, then they will get themselves into trouble.

Although I don’t have a view, I believe that parents should keep informing their children about how certain websites could be dangerous.  Websites such as Myspace and Facebook COULD be dangerous, but if teenagers use the sites responsibily then they wont have to worry about anything.

One thing I think though to prevent danger from these websites are putting certain privacy settings on your page.  In the article it mentioned how parents and educators could encourage teens to do this.  This is one way to play it safe.

There is one thing I do to remain safe online and it is not to speak to strangers.  You never know who you are communicating with in the internet world.  A 45 year old man could pretend to be a 18 year old man.  There have been so many stories about how girls meet with guys from over the internet and then end up getting raped or killed.

I think it is very important to remain safe on the internet.  Another thing I do on the internet is not give out any information about where I live or what my phone number is.  I think these steps are very important to play it safe.

I didn’t really like working in the groups creating a tutorial.  In the beginning it wasn’t too bad and I thought it would be okay, but towards the end it seemed like we had to rush to get everything done.  Also, it seemed like not all the work was divided up evenly and it seemed like some people did more work than others.

I think that this group project could improve in the future if the work is divided up ahead of time.  Also, another suggestion would be to choose your own group because sometimes its hard to work with people who don’t want to work as hard as others.

It seemed like some groups liked working on this tutorial.  Some groups worked well together, while others didn’t.  The groups that succeeded I think learned how to communicate better than the ones who didn’t do as well.

      The smallest things such as organizing your ideas and having the background and text flow together are important things while developing your blog.  From creating a blog in Online Communications class I have learned how to develop a blog in a more proper manner.

     The development of blogs I believe is important to readers and viewers of your web page.  I know that when pages have one long paragraph then most users will just not read what you’re writing.  The reason for this is because it looks like just a whole bunch of ideas and thoughts together, which may not be poorly written, but needs to be organized better.  I know that I tend to do this a lot, but it is just a bad habit.

     To prevent this from happening I am going to try to organize my ideas better.  When I finish writing my blog entry I will proof read what I wrote a few times to make sure that the content is well written and is organized well.  Other than that I will use spell check to make sure all of my words are spelt correctly.

     Another thing that I learned from the development of blogs is having readers be able to read what your writing.  If your writing a good post, how will others be able to read it if it is not readable?  You need to have text that is readable and have a background that is not conflicting with the text.

This week in class we had received groups for our tutorial project.  We learned how to add pages to our collabroative wiki and learned how to use the tool bar for it.  The pages that we added to our wiki were Collabrative wiki, sample tutorial, and helpful links.  The Sample tutorial showed us what a tutorial is like and we learned more about it.  Another thing that we learned is that when using wiki anyone in the group can edit or change what is being wrote.  There is a history of the wiki that shows everything that was added to it.  On Friday we brain stormed what we want to do our tutorials on and started our project.

This week I was not in class very much because I was sick.  One thing that I learned this week though was how to create a new page.  I created an about me and wrote a little bit about myself in it.

This week in class I learned how to work and manage my blog.  I found out how to add widgets and to change my blogs subtitle.  Some widgets that I put on my blog were the general search bar, google search bar, email subscribe and meta.  From adding my widgets I learned that you cannot use certain side bars to place the widgets.  When we had a sub I changed my theme to Mandigo and I learned how to create my own image in the header.  Along with this I learned how to change my header, I selected a quote to put on my header because it is a positive quote and I like quotes.  Lastly, I learned how to add the online communications blog to my blogroll.  This week was a very progressive week.