Jack’s Online Communication Blog

This week, we were assigned a new group project where we are to create a tutorial using Microsoft Encoder. We will be creating a video tutorial like the ones here on edublogs. Our group brainstormed and decided we all have a decent knowledge on how to use Power Point. Since creating an overall tutorial on Power Point is very general, we decided we would focus on the presentation part of it including backgrounds and animations. I know that I was never great at making Power Points look appealing but I have learned about it using it over the years.

 By doing this project, I will gain more knowledge with Power Point and hopefully others will as well! Our group is off to a great start with most of the steps already finished on how our tutorial will go.

 Also this week, I read up on Microsoft Encoder. It seems like it shouldn’t be extremely hard to use, but being a new program at a school where many things can go wrong with the Internet, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

So last year I was on track, and unfortunately can’t do it this year due to other obligations, but I hope to do it next year. In order to prepare myself better, I read some tips on running faster but more importantly, in a healthy way.

http://completerunning.com/archives/2006/09/12/100-beginner-running-tips/

Another site that can be useful for tips on distance running is:

http://www.distance-running-tips.com/

This week, we started to think about our end of the year project, which ultimately is the project where we can incorporate everything we learned into this last project. The first step in doing this is to have 10 questions prepared to ask the person whom we are working with about their goals for the website. Since that is this weekends homework, I have been thinking about ideas but have not typed them up yet. My concentration is buisness, and while I don’t have an extensive knowledge on buisness, I know I am going to try to advertise (one of the major aspects of buisness) Mrs. Hart’s club and one I am involved with, The Natural Helpers, by hopefully advertising events that we do. One of my goals for this website is to not only to advertise the club, but make it a spot where current members can access any information about upcoming events, etc.

In order to successfully accomplish this project, there is still much more about the online world to be learned. One thing I learned about this week was usability. Usability is how extensive a user’s experience is when working with a product, like a website. Usability is important because while many websites offer information or products, the actual website is either complicated or doesn’t appeal to users. When we’re looking ahead to our final projects, we want to use usability to make sure others are attracted to the website so it can be used past this class.

Class was really disrupted this week due to CAPT, but I did learn a bit in the past half hour when I was doing the homework. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and the purpose of this is to view newly added posts, etc. easier through (what I use) Google Reader. It makes viewing blogs and other web sites a lot easier. I didn’t realize until I learned this how many websites use RSS feeds until I looked at two websites that I view daily. I discovered both of them had this RSS feed option.

I also saw how plugins work. I was always aware what a plugin did but never got to experiment with them to see what they actually added. When I went on those same two websites, I was able to see which plugins they had activated such as the Contact Box and Subscription plugin. 

In the past week of class, I have learned many things regarding the WWW and HTML. The WWW is set up in a series of “groups” as I like to think of it as. It goes from: Web Pages–>Web Serves–>Web Clients–>Web Browser. I learned that HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language which means that each page contains HTML to tell the browser how to display the web page which is how cool graphics are added to websites. I always heard of Javascript but never knew exactly what it was. However, all it is, is a scripting program that is directly in HTML pages. In addition to learning about the WWW and how HTML is used, I learned basic steps in using the “Coffeecup” program. We did not get very far in class with this, but I learned the simple steps how to connect to the server from coffeecup so I can work with coffeecup at home.

This blog will contain different reflections and other misc. items pertaining to Online Communication.