Journal #6

 Jennifer Lau

GED 512

Journal Entry

Journal Entry 6:  Self Reflection

I have learned a lot though this course.  It has been a challenge, though.  I never thought I would ever see the back end of a website, let alone create the code for my own.   Although I am still learning, it is something I know I’ll need to keep working at, but will be truly rewarding in the end when I can create my own running website. 

The challenges I have encountered throughout the course have been understanding the coding and how it all comes together.  I have always created pieces through Print Shop programs where everyone was so amazed with what I created, but know I look back and am quite saddened by how much I didn’t know.  I wish I had a basic foundation and understanding of CSS and HTML before I started the course because everything goes so quickly in the quarter and I had to grasp a lot.  In the end, though, it is all worth it and I just have to keep at it.

The most helpful to me were the book exercises and class labs.  The class labs were more direct and I had an opportunity to ask my classmates and professor for help.  The book exercises were helpful with their step by step directions and explanations within each chapter, but sometimes I found myself having to figure things out because I didn’t already have the background knowledge to problem solve or trouble shoot an issue. 

I have a lot to learn, but I look forward to the next course where I can build upon what I have learned, continue to practice the skills, and create something more spectacular than what I had with Print Shop.

Journal #7

Jennifer Lau

GED 512

Journal Entry

Journal Entry 7: Professional Learning Network

The professional learning network is a powerful tool to have and use.  It is a place where collaboration begins and can continue to teach so many professionals in the same field.  It is a source of information from many avenues that can build upon knowledge or help one to answer questions and use different styles and techniques such as in a classroom. A professional learning network is something I knew of, but never dove into exploring until so many resources of its kind have been presented in this course.  

When I was exploring global learning sites, I stumbled upon so many different things that sparked my creativity.  I was wondering about what my students could do or make to help others in need.  I found different ideas teachers had that I had never thought possible.  It also contained different organizations that I have thought of, but never knew how to incorporate them in both my curriculum and in a project to donate to the organization.  After much research through the global learning sites, I have chosen to have the kids make knot blankets to donate to children’s shelters.  It ties in heavily with our character education program at school.

When compiling my RSS feed, I didn’t know what to include and who to follow.  It took me awhile to gather the sites that I thought would be helpful to me and my classroom. Some of the sites included a lady from an educational background that thought about using blog with her students.  She also incorporated a lot of technology into her classroom where now I want to try just a handful of what she has created into my own classroom.  Last year, I had my first graders create eBooks for their animal research project.  It started off as a challenge, but once they got started, they were thriving.  I was so impressed with them.  I will try it again, but look up some more feeds to help with the troubleshooting and research resources the kids can use.

Each of these components has made me a better teacher for my students.  I have been incorporating the different things I read about or learn about in my classroom slowly and they have been quite successful.  My students are more engaged, I am more confident in my work when trying something new and know that I have others out there as supporters who are both rookies and experts.

Journal #5: Twitter

Twitter in the Classroom

With so much social media going on, I was reluctant to create a Twitter account.  It is just another account I have to keep up with and my thoughts were that it was just a place for people to follow celebrities.When I signed up, it asked me to choose so many different people to follow.  Naturally, I did and have not seen myself amused by much of what any of them had to say.  It wasn't until I read the 35 interesting ways to use Twitter in the classroom that I could see possibilities.

Scavenger Hunt was one of the first ideas that caught my attention.  My first graders will be creating ebook animal reports towards to end of the year and this can be another resource in which they can gather information about their animal and habitat to add to their research.  They will have fun locating their animal on a map too and see all the different places their animal lives.

Communicating with Experts seemed like an interesting and fun idea.  My students have a lot of good questions that they probably would find more exciting having it come from an expert in that field.  Here I can even ask my students' parents to be "our experts" since their occupations are quite diverse.  This way, my parents can feel like they are connected with the class as well if they are unable to physically come in and volunteer.

The home and school connection is really important in my district and I can see myself using Twitter Badges to update my classroom website and have students tweet about what they've learned about a certain topic as well to help with the class discussions as well as help to inform parents since kids don't really talk about their day much anymore.

There are many concerns I have with privacy issues and parents and students abusing this type of social media in the school setting.  It is sometimes difficult to draw the line between social media with friends and social media in education.  Since Twitter is so popular in social media, the norms may be lost when using it for education and can cause more of a problem than what is worth.

Journal 4 Final Project Idea

•   Site title – Animal habitats

•   Developers – Jennifer Lau & Ann Lam

•   Rational or focus – The goal for this web page is to provide a website for first grade students to explore and learn about animal habitats such as grasslands, ocean, ponds and forests. Our objective is to provide content information, pictures and videos for students to learn about the different animal habitats.

•   Main features outline – There will be a homepage that lists the four different habitats. Then there will be individual pages for each habitat and then pages connecting to the habitats of animals that live in that habitat.

•   Content – There will be a total of 9 web pages including the homepage. Each page will have its own habitat that includes content, video and pictures. We can also include informational links that direct students to appropriate websites for more information.

•   Target audience – The target audience is first grade students.

•   Design considerations. The design goal for the site is for first grade students to learn about habitats.  It is a resource they can use to complete their habitat and animal report.

•   Limiting factors – One limiting factor would be to learn how to embed videos into the website. Another factor would be that the content needs to be at the reading level of first grade students including EL Learners. 

 Wireframe

Journal Entry #3: Commercial Concerns in the Social Web

Friesen, N. (2010, December 6). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3149/2718



In the article, "Education and the social web: Connective learning and the commercial imperative" by Norm Friesen, Friesen argues that "commercial social networks are much less about circulating knowledge than they are about connecting users with advertisers."  He focuses his article on Facebook, Twitter, and Diggs and brings about four points: learning in a 2.0 web, the media business model, the use of an algorithm to define audiences, and connectivist and commercial priorities.  All in all, has the social network evolved into a controlled world led by advertisers?

Before this article, I never really looked at social networking as benefiting or being based upon education.  Although it might have begun with that intention or has been marketed to be of education, I have never thought of it as such.  When Friesen discusses the business plans of such social moguls like Facebook, Twitter, and Diggs, he mentions that their business model "...restricts their informational design that detract from learner control and educational use."  Isn't most everything influenced and led by advertisers and a higher being? Although, social networks claim to have begun from education and were geared toward learners and benefiting them, it most always evolves into commercialism if it wants to grow and succeed. 

Though there are aims in pushing social networking within the classrooms and education, we need to accept the fact that it is already there.  Commercialism and advertisements are going to be what run the sites and or apps and lead the user to where they want whether it be to other advertisements or to higher click counts.  Social media is being used in education, but not as excitingly.  Perhaps, if it is to be more educationally geared, then we as clickers, viewers, or subscribers should create that trend and lesson the commercialism.




Q1:  Do you think Facebook, Twitter, and Diggs can be more geared toward education and still have the advertisements within it?  


A1:  Yes, I believe that if teachers use it within their classrooms, they have to set the precedence, guidelines and rules and restrictions.  Parents have to be involved as well working together with the teacher to ensure that it is strictly used for education.  The difficulty with that is that students are intelligent and quite tech savvy.  They were born and raised in this technology and social networking and know how to navigate through it even with restrictions.  We should learn to to work with it and not against it as far as advertisements are concerned.  Commercial pressure may limit the social web for education, but not if we don't let it. 



Q2:  Friesen expresses his belief that "Education is clearly a social process."  Do you believe in that?

A2:  I believe that education is always evolving.  What was once learned through experience and textbooks is not learning through experience, textbooks, social media, and peers everywhere around the world.  Education has become less limited and more open to whomever wants to learn it.  Even though it has a lot to do with commercialism, many things in life is because of commercialism.  We as a society are guided by what we see and hear.  It is up to us to determine which path we want to go down even if it is a path led by someone else.  It is up to us to evaluate the decisions and create the outcome.  

Jennifer Lau

GED 512

Journal Entry #2: Diggs Reader and Affinity Group

No Longer A Dinosaur?

I’ve always seen and heard people talk about checking all of their newsfeeds and how many subscriptions they have.  One parent I had was sharing with me that all he did every morning before work was check all of his newsfeeds and then finish them throughout the day when he had a spare moment or two.  I thought, “How hard is that?” I check the weather and news on my phone, too and it takes me about 10 minutes to read the headlines and see how hot or cold the day is.  Well, apparently I was doing it all wrong.  I was called a dinosaur! 

“Rather than click on your daily news app and then the weather app and if you have some spare time, wait for the website links you type into Google on your phone to load, why not read it all from one place?” he asked.  “One place?  Impossible” I told him.  I figured it was out of my realm.  After all, he was a computer programmer and wrote out scripts to teach the computer.  I’m a teacher trying to keep up to date with my students.  He named off a bunch of apps that were capable of housing all of your newsfeeds, but I didn’t pay too much attention because I was so blown away by such an absurd idea. 

Here I am now.  In my web design course asked to try it out.  I was skeptical; resistant.  How would I possibly have so many feeds I’d be interested in following?  Well, to my surprise, it is quite amazing.  Not only do I have everything housed in one place, it actually updates itself and gives me a chronological list with titles of the articles.  I don’t have to search.  All I have to do is scroll and click.  It has actually taught me a thing or two about what I can add in my teaching and classroom activities.  I can learn from others who are in the same boat as I am with the new Common Core Standards rolling out and incorporating technology more so into my curriculum to prepare my students to the future.  This is why I joined the affinity group groups.diigo.com/group/classroom20.  Classroom 2.0 shares with me some obstacles teachers have had with ipads, the do's and don'ts with ipads in the classroom and what I can do with the apps and ipads in the classroom.  All in all, diggs reader was a great idea and now I have a way of organizing all of the feeds in one place.  The most important thing, I feel, from this diggs.com reader is that now I can feel less like a dinosaur.  

Q1:  What do you hope to gain from the affinity group Classroom 2.0? 

A1:  I hope to get up to speed with what teachers are doing with the ipads they use in their classrooms.   I hope to also get some ideas to share with my colleagues about ipads and their apps.  It is also a struggle for veteran teachers to jump on board with ipads in the classrooms which makes it hard for my first grade team and me to implement these new skills when others are so resistant.  

Q2:  Do you think students would be able to create either a blog or a diggs reader for the classroom?

A2:  I had a colleague who taught Kindergarten start a classroom blog (moderated by the teacher and parents).  She would start with a general question of, "What was the favorite part of your day?" and move along the year with questions like, "Why is it important to be a good friend?" "How can you be a good friend?"  She told me that of course it started slowly, but as they became more familiar with the keyboard and had parent support, students started to blog more and discuss it in class.  This helped her class become more close knit and friendlier to one another.

Journal Entry #1

Jennifer Lau
GED 512
Reflection of Chapters 1-3

Robbins, J. (2012). Learning Web Design : A Beginner's Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly. 




Summary: 
 
After reading chapters 1-3, it really opened my eyes to just how much goes into web design.  Not only do you have multiple parts of the web page that consist of layers, but the URL itself also contains specific sections.  I knew it was a complex system, but when it is broken down in the text book, it really made me realize just how much it really consisted of. 

When talking about what you need to get a web page started, it seems pretty straight forward.  However, when you actually begin to build upon component and component, there are so many more details that need to be addressed before the whole comes together.  Though it may seem as though you only need the basics such as: an up-to-date computer, extra memory, a large monitor, scanner or digital camera, a second computer, and mobile devices, and the software, one really needs to know what the end goal is and what part can be done by yourself or if a team of experts is needed to achieve your goal.  When putting together all of the components, it was interesting to read that everything was made up of layers.  The CSS or cascading style sheets is made up like a layer of cake.  First, you would  need the structure or the foundation of the web page using HTML.  Next, you would to build upon that layer with style sheets called the presentation layer.  The last layer you would need is the behavior layer.  Here scripts are written up to make an interactive page.  Once all of these come together, the web page is ready to be navigated and is also appealing to the eye.  

Q1:  How would understanding the basic components of web design be beneficial?
A1:Knowing and understanding basic components of web design allows you to create a strong foundation of understanding in which you can build upon.  Creativity can be utilized more so when you understand what and why something is happening and how it looks.  When you have a basic understanding of web design, you can troubleshoot faster and learn to build upon what you know to create something new.

Q2:  Can a webpage be incorporated into my classroom? 
A2:  I have come across many technical difficulties with my district website.  It is supposed to be a plug and play type format where you can click the different sections and then post up the content.  Unfortunately, it is quite limited as far as creativeness goes and it is also quite visually boring.  By learning how to create a web page, I can then use the one I create rather than use the district version.  I can also create some sort of project where students can create a mock webpage that goes along with a book report of some sort.  This way, I can begin to prepare my students of the future more so rather than stick to the ways I am used to.  This allows me to learn and take a chance with technology rather than sit back and watch as my students begin to teach me everything that is so second nature to them with technology.