Deskcrits

I gave 4 deskcrits this semester:
1. Given to Marianne Walters during the first project day (10/16/08). Marianne has a lot of talent as a web designer. She created an informational site for her Spanish students with tons of resources! Her concern is that her Spanish flag keeps moving when she views her work in the browser. She doesn't understand why it's in one place in Dreamweaver and then in another place when she views it in Internet explorer. We played around with a couple of ideas. I told her to possibly put in a table or a layer to keep in from moving around. She said she would try that. Another concern she has is that some of her text is highlighted and underlined like a link would be when, in fact, it is not a link. Dr. Rieber ended up helping us with this problem because we couldn't figure it out. Apparently she had too many folders and the text was being associated with a text in another folder. I hope I was a good mentor for Marianne. At times, I felt like I didn't know the answers to any of the questions she asked! Her site ended up looking really well put together.

2. Given to Chrissi Sperling during the second project day (10/30/08). When I first saw Chrissi's project she was still in the process of trying to figure out what exactly she wanted to do for her final project. She had lots of ideas but was having trouble honing in on one idea. I attempted to help her clean up her Dreamweaver folders. She had so many folders within folders within folders. The system was getting confused (and so were we) as to which file or page she needed to upload where. I suggested to her that she might want to start simple since this was her first time taking the class. I also suggested to her that she have a lighter background. Her text was blue and her background was black, and it was very difficult to read.

3. Given to Carrie Bishop on showcase rehearsal night (11/13/08). Carrie's project looked good on rehearsal night. She said she still had a lot to do but what she had done so far was great. She was focusing on using a quiz creating software, rather than a site she had developed herself. There was not a lot that I told her to change. I liked how the quiz contained a video embedded into it. I also liked the feedback that the quiz gave. There was even a way for the user to leave comments after the quiz was finished.

4. Given to Carolina Robinson on showcase rehearsal night (11/13/08). Carolina's online scrapbook is so cool!! I'm a scrapbook lover myself so I was super excited to see that there is now a way to create scrapbooks online so that you can share them with others without having to ship your big book over to them and pay a hefty price at the post office. I was really impressed with Carolina's knowledge of scrap booking and with online development. She seemed to really know what she was doing. Carolina was also pretty much done with her project by the time I saw it but I really didn't have anything to tell her about how to fix it or make it better. I really loved how unique and creative her site was. She did a great job of putting her personality into her site.

Service Hours

Here is a list of my service hours for the semester:

• Helping mentees during project days - 2 hours
• Helping mentees during non-project days - 2 hours
• Assisting my TST (technology support technician) with web site updates - 4 hours
• Assisting fellow teachers with promethean interactive board software and hardware - 2 hours

15/5 - December 3, 2008

The past two weeks have been SUPER busy for our team. After the showcase rehearsal I think we all breathed a small sigh of relief and took some time to enjoy the holiday and the small break from school and work. Then it was back to work full speed ahead.

For the past two weeks I have been working on entering all of the information for the lessons 3 of the last lessons. I entered the text into the templates that Trudy had already made. Then I had the challenge of trying to figure out how to input the pictures into the pages as well. Trudy has also made a template of a picture format we were going to use for all of our pictures (she is an incredible leader!). That task turned about to be a bit more daunting that I had originally thought. I had to search through the plethora of pictures our client provided for us. Some pictures she had designated for certain pages, but others were up to us to choose. So once I found a picture I liked for a certain topic, I had to copy into a picture editing software, then copy it into Fireworks, and resize it and change the orientation, then finally save it and pull it into Dreamweaver.

I have to say that the end result was pretty great! Our site is awesome and our client is so pleased with what we have done. I'm very proud of how well our group worked together!

The showcase is tonight and I expect it to go very smoothly. We're meeting early so that we can go over our presentation and make sure we have enough time to say all that we need to say.