Final Project Reflections

As I was putting the finishing touches to my web site I had a chance to reflect how far I have come. I didn’t grow up with having technology being so readily available and affordable as it is in today’s world. For example, hand-held digital calculators weren’t affordable until my senior year in high school. For me, personal computers and the internet weren’t even common place in the classroom until fairly recently. Yet, here I am now writing on my blog about my experiences in creating my website and having just realized how far I have progressed in using internet based technologies, in just a few short months. This transition has had its challenges. However, I have discovered with perseverance I can do it.

When I initially considered the design for my web site Mrs. Nowak’s Notes, I wanted to provide my special education students and their parent’s information relevant class information. I determined that for the Informal Algebra II class that a listing of the upcoming assignments, quizzes and tests was a must. Since the NovaNet class is a student paced program offered as a course for credit recovery, it has strict rules and guidelines for the students to follow to remain in or pass the class. Each student is using a computer for their specific course and working at their own pace. I am there to ensure the students are keeping on task, completing the necessary modules and assist with any questions they might have regarding their courses. Due to the wide variety of classes students may be taking during one class period and the individualized rate at which students' progress, syllabuses, lesson plans and class assignments are not a part of this class. However, I felt the participation rules and guidelines needed to be posted on my web site for the students and parents to have available, should any concerns be brought up regarding the course requirements. I decided to include links to web sites that could assist students, in the off hours with any problems that they may have with their homework assignments. I also saw an opportunity for the web site to provide additional information on career and college options. Knowing that parents would also visit my web site, I decided to include financial aid and scholarship information as well. It was important for me to create a web site that was organized, had a professional look and feel to it as well as being easy to navigate.

I used the Weebly.com to create my web site since it provides users free online hosting and web site development tools. Weebly’s website enables a user to develop their websites online without requiring any special software other than a web browser. Though the site has a predefined or “canned” set of templates and element layout options, it does provide enough of a variety to enable someone like me to create a unique web site.

I initially experimented with a variety of Weebly’s templates until I found one that had a look and feel I liked. Weebly provides the content element tools that I can best describe as a type of place holder for web page elements such as graphics, text, video, forms and columns. A user can place the content elements on the web page by simply dragging and dropping the element within the page and then can go back and add text or upload the graphics within each element later. I did learn that the web page has to be built from the top down and I had to consider the placement of the text and graphics before I added them. I did find that I could move content elements around the page after they had been placed and text or graphics added. Weebly’s web site builder uses a “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) interface, which I really liked since I could see how the site was coming together.

I did discover that when I published the site and viewed it outside of Weebly’s Site Builder that sometimes the element or information wasn’t being displayed as it had looked within the site builder. This did require return to the site builder to make adjustments so that the published site had the appearance I desired.

My greatest challenge was in creating and adding the weekly schedule for class assignments located on the Informal Algebra II page. I wanted to create a table to organize the information. I was familiar with creating a table in Microsoft Word and thought that I could just copy and paste it into the website. Unfortunately, it did not work as I had hoped. When copying the table from Word to the web site it lost its formatting and I could not correct it.

I decided to research how I could put a table into the web site. I found the following websites provided excellent information and instructions to create them:W3 School,HTML Code Tutorial
and DaveSite.com. Unfortunately, I discovered that I would have to write the actual HTML code to create a table but the sites provided excellent examples for me to follow and experiment with. They were also very helpful when I wanted to make changes within the tables such as font selection, sizing, bolding or changing text color. I was concerned that I would be required to use a special program to write html code in but I found the Thinkydink.com web site which explained how I could write the “HTML code” without any special software by just using a text editing program.

I decided to use the Windows Note Pad application. I would first write the html code and then changed the file extension from .txt to .html and the save it to my desktop. I could then click on the file from the desktop and it would open Internet Explorer and show me my table that I had created. This took a lot of trial and error for me, but the W3 School website really helped me fine-tune the table by providing me information about formatting and changing the color of the text in the table’s cells. Once I had completed the table and was satisfied with it (after many frustrating hours) I used the HTML Content Element tool in Weebly site builder to place the HTML element where I needed it to be on my web page and copied and pasted my code from notepad into the content element.

My work didn’t stop with just one table; I had to create separate tables for each week of assignments. I found that by using the original table I had created that I could save time by just changing the information within it and making a few minor changes for text color or the spanning of cell between two rows. As I added each table to the Informal Algebra II page, I found that the page grew very large and became cumbersome to find a previous week’s assignments. I then decided to add hyperlinks that would connect to the previous week’s page. Since the pages are identical, except for the table, it appears to a user that the table changes and the page stay the same. It does require me to have created identical Informal Algebra II pages for each week. Unfortunately, the Weebly web builder does not have a tool to duplicate a page. So I did have to create each page manually.

There were some issues that I did have with using Weebly. The most frustrating was the unpredictability of the web builder. It would tend to lock up unexpectedly and lose any changes in the content that I had made. Sometimes the site would revert back to the old data after publishing the web site or it would change the fonts or layouts. At times it was the web builder was extremely slow, particularly when switching between web pages to edit. I found that the Weebly uses predefined fonts for the template chosen and the web builder does not provide the ability to change it. However, I accidentally found a way around this when I was copying text from a Microsoft Word document using an Arial font, and when pasting the text to the web site the font style was kept. Since I liked Arial font, I decided to write all my text in Microsoft Word and the just copy and paste it into the content elements.

This was an excellent experience for me. It has expanded my understanding of the effort it takes to develop a web site. I came to realize that a web site needs to be planned out and a consideration given for how the information is to be conveyed, which can almost be as important as the information itself. It also provided a great learning opportunity for me, particularly with learning how make a table using HTML.