Alyssa’s Blog

The week of May 26-30 was a work week.  Along with being a work week, this was a short week since we didn’t have school on Monday.  I think that by having a short week and the project coming to an end I pushed myself to work hard to add more to my project.

On Wednesday we had received our mid term project grades to see how we were progressing.  I feel that the grade I had gotten was greater than I thought it would be.  When I got the paper I was happy that I could see what I could work on to improve my advisor’s blog.

Throughout the week I continued to work on my advisor’s blog and make it the best it could be.  On Friday we learned how to add polls and surveys to our blogs.  I liked working with the polls because it adds a little extra to spice up the page.

On Monday I worked on my advisors blog and on Tuesday I added the audio on my page.  This audio page was placed underneath the text only link.  When visiting this page, you can hear my entries speaking out loud by a sound voice.  I thought it was pretty interesting how it translated my website into audio.

In the middle of the week, I created a chart to add to my portfolio page.  This chart contains work that I have done in the class so far this year.  I think that creating the chart would be useful for future use.  It helped me work more with the code side of the posts.  On my chart I added my brochure in publisher, my advisors website, and my project progress page.

I was not in class on Thursday and Friday.  I think that on Thursday there was a sub, so the class worked on their advisor’s pages and I think there was a tutorial on Friday from what I remember what Mr. Stengel said.

Overall,  I think that even though I was not in for the end of the week, I understand more about my website from adding the audio and the chart to my page.

This week in class we learned how to create a Google calender.  From learning how to create a Google calender, I put up an athletic calender on my own page.  I will try to keep up with this calender and write when I have hockey games, when I will go to the gym and when I will go running at the track.  I also plan on creating a Google calendar for my advisor.

Something else that I did this week was mess around with the widgets.  I explored the widgets and looked around for widgets for my advisor’s page.  I e-mailed my advisor and talked to her about widgets, but I still haven’t heard anything from her.  I created a page for widgets, but the widgets weren’t working so I deleted the page.

On Friday I added two new things to my advisor’s page.  First, I found a picture of the Statue of Liberty and I put it in paint and adjusted it to the size I wanted it.  Then I got the html code and put it on my advisor’s page in a side bar.  Also, I checked out the teacher tube and explored for videos.  I found a video that has something to do with history, and then Mr. Stengel showed me how to put the video on the page.

Earlier this week we learned how to add something that we created in paint to our blog.  I made something and put it on my page, but then I took it off.  Although I took it off, I think that this is something useful to add to a blog.  You can have text or an image, which is a good way to get a message out or let the audience know what your blog is about.

Throughout the week I worked on my blog.  To be completely honest, this week was a little hectic and I didn’t get the chance to talk to my advisor as much as I would have expect to.  One thing I learned this week from working on my advisor’s blog was that certain themes cannot have more than one side bar.  By learning this, I decided to choose the Mandigo theme because I feel more experienced with that theme and I like working with it.

Yesterday in class we had to read an article on widgets.  From reading this article I have learned a few things.  I learned that MySpace is part of Fox Interactive Media, which had bought Photobucketfor $300 million.  I find this interesting because I have used Photobucket to place photos on and get codes to add to my MySpace page in the past.  After reading this, I also learned that Yahoo and Google also have their own widgets.

In class today we had received our grades for our April blog entries.  From reading the comment that Mr. Stengel had left me about the title I enabled the shading around the title.  I didn’t know how to do this until I asked Kayleigh and she helped me find it.  Thanks Kayleigh!

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.

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 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.