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This has been my favorite class of all the classes that I have taken while in my EMM masters program. The content was relevant and interesting, the instruction was spot on, and most of the classwork was useful and not filler. Before taking this class I knew a little about html, but not enough to build a simple website. I had used html to build fancy mail merge emails, but knew very little about much else. I feel that had I actually been diligent with the assignments I probably would be even more knowledgeable about html, but I have to admit to not reading the book as I should have. Instead I skipped to all the grey boxes and just did what I needed to do to get the assignments done. I am looking forward to giving this book the attention that it deserves this summer. I am very grateful for the classwork that we did each week because it is a physical takeaway that I can use as a reference guide while building in html. I really feel that this quarter was just such a whirlwind that I never really got to give my classes the full attention that they deserved.

PLNs Blog Post 7

     Professional Learning Networks… gotta love them. I have joined multiple PLNs since becoming a teacher. As always, when I first join the PLN I am very active in both posting and responding to others in the network, but after a few months I get busy stop checking it as much and eventually I stop signing in all together. Thankfully I have found a solution to my deteriorating interest. Email and Google+. I have joined various communities on Google Plus and since I don’t ever go to the actual Google Plus site I opted to get emails whenever anyone posts in the communities that I am interested in. This is working great for my smaller moderately active communities, but I quickly learned that for some of my very large educational communities this was not a good option. I was getting as many as 30 emails a day from just one of the larger communities.

     So how did I use my PLNs? I really used them mostly like an RSS feed to keep up on the latest in my field of interest. However, a few days ago I was asked by one of my teachers about 3D printing, all of our schools have at least one 3D printer, with carbon filament. I had no idea if they could print with carbon fiber filament and the manufactures website was of no help, so I turned to Google+. Within 10min I had multiple responses from people who had the same printer who had tried printing with carbon filament. It was awesome.

Journal #5

        So, I've been using Twitter off and on for a little over a year and a half. I have found it to be useful for professional development in that I can search nearly the entire world, yes Twitter is that popular, for a keyword and find info on it.

     With the use of hashtags (#) people are creating searchable databases at the rate of nearly 6,000 tweets per second. Now, having spent more time on Twitter I can say that a whole lot of them are useless junk, but with the 500 million tweets that get sent out each day you can still find a lot of good stuff out there.

Journal #3 Commercial Concerns in the Social Web

Without using an LMS

In his article the author, Friensen, contends that as educators we should be wary of moving towards integrating technology into our classrooms because many of the services we use to accomplish this task are businesses. He states that they are not in the business of education and the students are not their customers; the companies that they sell advertising to are their real customers. He also contends that all the advertising is distracting our students from learning. I would have to agree with him to some extent however I think that advertising on the side of your web-browser is here to stay and it will become an important life skill to be able to utilize the web or web-based apps, stay on task, all while adds are flashing and dancing on the side. I understand that with younger students this may be too much of a distraction and that is where as a teacher we need to utilize tools like a well developed LMS, learning management system, to funnel content from the web to our students free of advertising. The LMS our district uses, Haiku, will strip away the adds from a YouTube video as well as the “if you liked this video check out these” links at the end of the video and leave the students with just the intended content void of any distractions.

Using an LMS

Nings and RSS

About two years ago I joined Schoology (as first just to check out their LMS), but I discovered their professional communities and at the time they were very active. I haven’t been logging in as much as I used to, but I will start again for this assignment. I am a part of the Math, Flipped Classroom, and Blended Learning communities. I like these communities because they are actual teachers in the classroom and they are putting into practice the things that I am teaching my teachers here in PUSD.

Ok, for my Digg RSS stream I created two folders of interest. The first was for technology in the classroom and I added only 3 feeds to that folder. I didn’t want to get too buried with reading the articles. And yes, I read them; it’s what interests me. My other folder is for a personal interest of mine motorcycles, but more specifically cafe racers. I have 6 streams in that folder and I love it! I need to add more because each day there might only be 7 - 10 new articles and I want more.

Question #1

My edtech feed has some really good stuff can I embed my feed onto my LMS for my teachers?

While there are tons of scripts that convert RSS feeds into Javascript*, I recommend using Google Gadget Creator for adding feeds to web pages – it’s easy as well as customizable.

*If you are looking for a non-Javascript solution, get one of these Flash based RSS widgets from Yourminis or WidgetBox.

Question #2

How do I use the Google Gadget Creator?

Google’s guide to Gadet Creator - https://developers.google.com/gadgets/docs/basic

Assignment 1

Learning Web Design Chapter 1-3 Summary

The first chapter of this book starts with a simple yet enlightening look at all the different facets that go into web design. I’ve never given it much thought, and so I just assumed that most sites were designed by one or two people working together. I never realized all the different roles that contribute to a well designed site. I appreciate the way the author addresses the individual who may be interested in web design as a solo developer and how she, the author, tells you the reader the bare basics you will need to get started.

Chapter two gets into some of the background knowledge that one should have if they are considering going into web design. For the most part a lot of this information was review, however, I didn’t know that the first part of a web address was the protocol. It’s also pretty cool to think about how quickly your request hits all the different servers before going to the site you want.

Chapter three gets addresses the fact that although there is only one web there are a multitude of ways in which we access that web and how we access the web will greatly affect the way we view sites. I found it very interesting that responsive web design serves up a single HTML to the viewer and then uses CSS to differentiate based upon screen size. That is actually really cool. Yep, I’m a nerd, those sort of things are cool to me.

Question 1: How does the site know what size screen you are accessing the web with?

Because client-side Javascript code has access to that kind of information.

Question 2: What does the code look like for responsive design?

Found this at http://whatsmyscreenresolution.com/ and pressed ctrl+u to view the page's (client-side) source code, and I got this:

<div class="col-md-4 col-md-offset-2 well"> <h3>jQuery code to get window resolution:</h3> <p class="codeSection"> ; (function () {<br /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;$(window).width();<br /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;$(window).height();<br /> })();<br /> </p> </div>