Journey 7 Professional Learning Network

Journal 7

Before taking this class, I already had a lot of experience using Twitter. However, it was purely for personal use and I was not aware of some of the inner workings of Twitter. Now I know that there are specific topics that we can monitor using hashtags, and that these hashtags can be used for educational purposes. Out of all the PLNs that we have looked at in this class, I think Twitter is the one that is the easiest to integrate into a classroom setting. It is by far the most mobile friendly and allows for easy communication between classmates, or between teacher and students.

The Digg accounts that we talked about seem very useful for classroom usage. Unlike Twitter, they cannot be used for communication but allow you to conveniently follow certain topics or news sites in one location. I believe that it would be more suited to a history classroom or any class that involves reading a lot of reference material or following current events.

For the affinity group, I had to apply to get in and was unfortunately not admitted. I do not know if I was actually rejected or if the process is still pending. But I can still read some of the posts, and it seems like it could be very helpful once I am teaching to share new ideas.

Q1: Can I see myself still using PLNs once this class finishes?

A1: Probably not Digg, but I will definitely continue using Twitter. The affinity groups will be very helpful when I start teaching too.

Q2: What other uses are there for the PLNs in classrooms?

A2: Twitter could be used to send emergency messages to students from administrators.

Journal 6 Self Reflection

I learned a great deal about HTML over the past few weeks.  I have actually made and been maintaining a website since I was in middle school, but the HTML standards now are very different than what they are now.  A lot of the things I learned back in middle school are now examples of what not to do in our textbook.  Additionally, I learned a lot of things that simplified some concepts that I learned in the past.  For example, if I wanted to use several versions of a single image with slight modifications, I would use PhotoShop and save all these versions of the image.  But the css image assignment we did showed that we could just use css to modify the image, and skip Photoshop altogether.

The most important lesson I have learned was something that was said in the first 2 weeks.  That is where the content of a website should be contained in the HTML, and the organization and style should be kept separate(in cascading style sheets).  When I was making websites in middle school, all of the content was mixed together with the structure and style.  So whenever I wanted to change the layout of a website, it would be an extremely tedious process of copy pasting every single style rule across pages. 

Q1: What was the hardest and most rewarding assignment?

A1: It had to be the 1 column HTML site, because making the site was so different from what I was used to.  Normally I would make a series of tables to create the layout, but instead we used CSS to structure everything.
http://www.cpp.edu/~alu/512/1col.html

Q2: What was the biggest adjustment to make?

A2: Keeping the style rules in the CSS rules, and adapting to the new HTML5 standards.