Yesterday I spent a great deal of time planning and developing my web authoring project. I developed it from an activity I helped with in a kindergarten classroom this past year. It is about Fred the monkey, who has gotten lost from his family and home. The class spends three weeks, using this as the theme for all their activities to learn about the jungle, the environment, animals therre, and monkeys specifically. They post messages online to Fred, and Fred responds to them. As a class, they read the questions and responses together. By the end of the three weeks, the classroom becomes transformed into a jungle and the students help develop a plan on how Fred will get back to his home. On my website, there is a forum for them to communicate with Fred. Every student is required to post at least one question and one suggestion on how they think Fred should get home. If they are unable to do so at home, they will have the opportunity to do it at school. There is a page labeled Location and Directions to access websites to learn more about black spider monkeys and where Fred is from. There is another page they are able to explore to see a variety of pictures of black spider monkeys in their habitat. I tried to keep the website basic, knowing that it will be kindergarteners or 1st graders using it. I also created the website as if Fred had made it and was trying to get help from the students in the class. Using http://www.webs.com/ to create this website was a fun and interesting experience. I thoroughly enjoyed trying to figure out how to create the website and make it fun and exciting for the students. However, I did have to spend a large amount of time to figure out how to use it and actually finding the information and pictures to create the website. Overall, I think it was a good experience and am happy to see how it can be useful for the classroom.

Spreadsheet and Mail Merge

I just finished my assignment for the spreadsheet and mail merge document. Overall, I think my work turned out well and I was quite proud of my ability to learn how to utilize the spreadsheet in an applicable manner with creating grade sheets and merging it to create letters for parents. I did come across a problem with my Word 2003 and Excel 2003. I was trying to merge the grades to appear as percentages on the word document, but when I merged the two, the grades appeared as the original decimals. However, on the excel sheet, they appeared as percentages in each cell for their grade. Even though, I became frustrated and struggled with figuring out how to make the mail merge work in an appropriate manner for my letter, I thought the project turned out well. I was happy with my work and what I learned from the assignment.

I have also completed Newsletter on Word, which I was extremely happy with. It was fun to design the newsletter. I loved finding pictures and designing the newsletter. It helped that I designed my letter around an activity I did this year with a Kindergarten class. It helped to address academic standards through an activity in the newsletter. This was definitely an assignment I enjoyed working on and completing.

The other project I have completed already is the Pageflakes assignment. I have to admit that I was very nervous about this project because it was definitely outside of my comfort zone with technology. However, to my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed designing my pageflake and figuring out how to upload videos and websites to my page. I was very happy to see how this project turned out and quite pleased with my hard work that went into it. This was definitely a beneficial project that I enjoyed completing and learning from.

I am off to go choose my next project I will be working on.

Reflection Blog

I have created this page for a Principles of Instructional Technology course I am taking through Ashland University. I will be posting comments as I go through this course and complete assignments. So far this has been an enlightening course. I view myself as a beginner when it comes to technology, so this is the perfect course for me to expand my understanding and abilities with a variety of technology.