Here’s what I accomplished this week:

This week to start off the project I began collaborating with my teacher whom I am creating the edublog for. I’m doing this to meet the needs of this certain teacher as far as what he wants on his site. So far he has told me only things to help him with the baseball team. However, I decided to make him a site that would work both for his classroom and his baseball team. I have created about five pages ready for content to be placed in them.

Make sure you look at or listen to this:

I added a few photos for my teachers website. School appropriate of course. One I believe is of a classroom full of kids showing studious behaviors. Another is of a little cartoon kid holding a paper with an A+ written on it. The little kid is very excited to have a good grade.

Here’s what I plan to work on next (Be specific on short term goals):

 I plan to work on Usability next. Things such as backgrounds that are easily readable. Links, text all things to help the user be able to do as much as they can right from the site. I also plan to put the more important things in the so-called hotspots of the page.

Here’s my complete and current to do list for the completion of the project (Be specific on long term goals):

 All I have for long term goals right now are to fill the pages I have created. I would like to fill them with important content that is easily usable and accesible. Then I will be able to add in the fun gadgets and such to the website.

Other thoughts and questions:

        We also learned about user access. On your blog you are allowed to have others access it and make changes or edits. There are different levels of user access. For instance, we just added Mr. Stengel as an administrative user so that he can have full access to our blogs. User access is important for those who would like to create and share a blog together. As a matter of fact, u can create a username and password without even having your own blog.

          Last but not least, we began corresponding withour advisors about the websites we are making for them We were able to have a site created for us by Mr. Stengel and then were able to make the neccessary adjustments to these sites according to the needs of our advisors.

         I decided to place certain widgets in certain areas after reading about these so called hot spots. Apparently the top-left portion of the page is something that you will automatically look for when entering a new page. Also the bottom-right portion when you are ready to leave the page. So I decided to make a few changes, one of which was to place my archives widget in the top-left making it easier for my teacher (Mr. Stengel) to find my articles and reflections of the month that he chooses.

        By reading this article I will now know in the future of webpage making to place more important items in the “hot spots” of the page. This will make my site more enjoyable and also easier to navigate for usability purposes.

Later on this week I read an article on online predators and how people believe that giving teens full useage of the internet will actually give them skills in protecting themselves. I agreed with that because, if you keep hiding teens from the world, I believe that will only hurt them in the long run.

Even later this week I read another article on a youtube incident when eight girls invited this one girl to their house and them proceeded to beat her while filming it so they could put it on youtube for all to see. The point I withdrew from the article was does youtube give kids a reason to break the law just to become famous. I agreed that it actually does because there are too many immature teens out there who will do almost anything just to receive some kind of recognition. The article then read that youtube would be filtering its content. I also agreed with that as being a good idea because if the teens know their video won’t be played then maybe they won’t even try to do something stupid.

        However, I do believe that there are many, many, immature teens out there who do get off on “flaunting there horrific deeds to become “famous”"! I also believe that just the plain fact that they are able to become famous from these deeds would proliferate teen violence.

        Therefore, in the long run I do agree with the full statement of the article. Make certain policies that block these things from being published and maybe you can stop a mess of future teen violence, bullying, and overall harm.

        My only other thoughts about this happening are that people who do these things just to bloat to their friends or become infamous have some serious mental issues.

        Here is a link if you wish to read more about the previous discussion.