samanthajc

This past week we learned how to put a web 2.0 application into a text widget.  This is just fancy talk for, we learned how to add an animation to our blogs!  The animation is called a voki, and they are characters you personally create to simply welcome you to your website.  It was a nice, fun little break from doing actual work on our blogs.

We recently had to read a few articles about how the internet is potentially harmful to teens or others in general.  I found most of it a bunch of crud, because I do not think the internet has that much negative effect on people.  It is the people that are acting negatively, using the internet incorrectly as a means to satisfy whatever terrible ideas they have in mind.

Also, GOOD NEWS! The class has finally started working on our big project, creating a website for the school that people can actually use!  The website I am creating is a school store for the athletic department, which I have decided to name THE LION’S DEN, seeing how our mascot for Foran is a lion and all! Buttttttttt we haven’t gotten too far, so ill update my blog as I progress with the new website.

(04/01/08) HAPPY APRIL FOOLS! 

This past week we started our tutorial webpages.  To start, we were put into four groups, mine is group number three and it consists of Kurt, Dean, and I.  We decided that we are going to create a tutorial for Photostory so that Joseph A. Foran High School students have another option for creating projects besides Powerpoint and Windows Movie Maker.  Photostory is an easy way to create videos or stories that one can record on the computer.  We started by adding helpful sites, like google, and then started the actual writing of the tutorial.  We did not get that far, but thats what this whole next week is for.

 (03/02/08)

This week in online communications I learned how to get started on making my own personal website.  I learned that we are creating these websites so that we can teach the teachers at our school, Joseph A. Foran High School, how to use edublogs so that in the future they can use this website with their students.  So far I have learned that using hotmail as your email source does not work too well with this website.  Hotmail considers this website as junk, or does not send the emails at all.  In order for this to work, I have recently created a gmail account, scsapilla@gmail.com.  After creating my new email, I was then able to activate my blog with the password they sent to my gmail.  Seeing how the password they send you is difficult to remember, I figured out how to change the password to something I will always remember.  I learned how to pick a theme so that my website is a little more personal and more interesting to look at; I choose the blue bird.  I also learned how to add to my sidebar.  I added recent posts, archives, google search, edublogs search, and categories to the sidebar.  After browsing the website, I learned how to add a plugin and activate the Advanced Editor which adds more styling options to my WYSIWYG (what you see if what you get) post editor, like font color, special characters, copy from word, etc.  I learned how to create, edit, save and publish a post also, which is obvious because this would not be here if I hadn’t.  And basically this is as far as I went because I did not learn what to do next.  As for next week, that is a whole different story and I am sure I will learn more ways to improve my edublogs website.