Dean’s Blog

           During this past week I’ve learned about Survey’s and Polls. Survey’s and Polls are very important in any webpage, because it is a social interaction tool that helps the Creator know how the visitors feel about a specific topic. Polls can be about anything, with no correct answer, it is just letting people voice their opinion. I’ve added a new catergory called Polls and Surveys, Although I haven’t made a survey yet, I’ve made a poll about basketball. I like this tool alot, the code that i’ve embedded on that page came from a very cool site called PollDaddy.com you can either be a member for free or pay to get bonus features. Top companies use this application on their websites such as FOX news network, PC World, and many others.

                  Also, I’ve noticed a big change in EduBlogs. Hooray!! Its a new version!! Yes Edublogs 3.0 is out and better than ever. It’ll take some time to adapt to this new setting, but Overall I think its a good change, before everything was clustered in different tabs, but now there is few tabs and it has improved its usability alot.

During this past week I’ve learned about Pod Casts, and how to make my blog posts have an audio version so people can listen to my blog from home or on their mobile devices. I also added a table on to my portfolio page. It keeps most of all my content and projects organized and very usable. I think it is a very effective way to display info, and is very convenient. Overall I think this week was a breeze because nothing was too easy or too difficult.

             During this week, We have learned about using special google applications.  One of them is Google Calendar, it is a web application offered by google. It allows users to organize their contacts and manage their schedule. This calendar is a great tool for students and teachers to interact with each other. When students needs to find out tonight’s homework assignment or last week’s assignment that he/she missed they can check their teacher’g google calendar and find out.

           Besides from that Google has many other applications that are quite useful such as Google Documents, which allows users to create and edit documents, either using word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation. Another application is Google Photos which is like a image hosting application and Lastly Google Reader, is a reader that is capable of reading XML internet language and RSS feeds.

During this week we have gotten into more depth about Widgets.

Before, I thought Widgets were fun things you can add to your webpage to make them fun, but its more to them than just that. They are little gadgets that people can Embed on to their personal web sites, so visitors can interact with their website. Widgets can be convenient for visitors, for example, some users might want to check dates or temperature, instead of opening more windows, they can simply look at the widget displaying their information. Widgets impacts the vistiors browsing experience.

I’ve added a text only access to my blog, so that people can access my blog from their phone, only getting the text only. Also I learned how to give people adminstrative powers to other people.

During this past week, I’ve learned two new things and applied it to my blog. A Text-Only link, that shows only text, and disables graphics and images. So people with a slow bandwidth or a internet featured cell phone can check what they need to check.

Another thing I’ve learned is how to Embed applications to my blog. Under the Widgets tab, i’ve added a Voki applications, by using codes like “<p>last.htm<p> etc.” Its really difficult to understand, but its really useful. At first I didn’t know what a Voki was, and how to spell it, but now I know. Its a cool application, that can be portrayed as your own Avatar that greets visitors to a webpage, by saying what ever you want him/her to say.

Working with partners (Sam and Kurt) was really fun and easy. We all contributed to the written tutorial, and Kurt did an outstanding job with the Video tutorial. We had to stay afterschool to finish our project, but it was worth it, and overall i think my group did a very good job.

From this past week I have learned alot about The HTML language, How the WWW works, Javascript, and other Online stuff.

During this week, I’ve been learning about Microsoft Media Encoder, and watching tutorials on it. Its Really Cool, and I think making the tutorial will be a challenge but also fun