Rachel Bronk's ETEC 565 Blog

This is an area that I feel moderately comfortable with having some experience with many of the skills mentioned in the toolkit. I have used both Dreamweaver and nVu in order to create an ePortfolio. This was a requirement at UBC during my B’Ed in 2006-2007 and I was hired as a “tech coach” to show my peers how to create a basic layout (or storyboard) for the ePortfolio and then translate that into either Dreamweaver or nVu. In my experience, they are both straightforward programs to use as long as you remember to “mirror” your basic page for formatting purposes. I think the challenge for me was uploading to the web using an FTP.

Regarding HTML, I was always a bit scared viewing the html source for a page and seeing an explosion of nonsensical characters. I just learning some html code this year because of the MET and because my ETEC 510 group was using Mediawiki. There are a lot of great html “cheat sheets” on the web which were helpful and I still use basic html for bolding, italicizing and underlining in MET discussion boards. I would not choose to write a site using html but I feel that given all that is available, that wouldn’t be necessary.

For this activity, I went through “Web Pages that Suck” and saw some sites that almost made me cross-eyed! I did find the checklist a bit daunting because it was so extensive and many of the items didn’t apply to my particular experience or needs. I have a current website and hosting for the purpose of having my own Mediawiki and because I thought I would need this for my ePortfolio (I am now going to use WordPress as my main shell and link to my own site). My site is www.pezonk.com. I feel that even though it is a basic site, it doesn’t “suck” largely due to the fact that I created it in iWeb which utilizes many of the considerations under “Design Questions” on the toolkit page. I would use iWeb in the future if I was required to make a website.

Much of this activity was simply review for me but I did like the guidelines laid out in “Design Questions” especially given the terrible, blinding “sites that suck” that I went through. I did learn something new and that was about cascading style sheets. I haven’t heard that term before and the resource provided was useful in explaining what they are.

After getting my Moodle site set up I thought I would try the toolkit activity. Previously, I have read materials about Moodle and the functions that it is capable of performing but I have never used a Moodle site as a teacher or as a student.

Overall, my experience was more positive than negative. I was able to complete the activity in about 10 minutes and I felt that I learned some new things. However, I relied heavily on the instructions from the activity. I consider myself to be very self-directed when it comes to new technology. I can usually open a brand new program and figure it out with maybe only minor help from a “help” menu or instructions. This was the case for me in learning Mediawiki, Fetch (FTP), iWeb, iMovie, CMaps and more. My fear with Moodle is that without direct instruction I won’t know how to proceed with some of the functions. In creating a discussion forum, it was obvious to me that I would select “add an activity-forum”. The questions for me came when I got to the creation screen and there were all of these drop down menus with default settings. I wasn’t sure if I should keep the default setting or if I should change it. I see that I will potentially have difficulties in this area…. for example, I don’t know what “aggregate type” refers to nor did I make sense of any of the options in the drop down menu. I assume that with time, I will figure these out. After all, Moodle has probably just assigned names to things that I might normally know but not by a particular name. I do anticipate having to spend a great deal of time learning about all of these options before becoming comfortable with Moodle.

On the upside, the links to further resources were helpful and there is a lot of self-directed teaching about the functions of Moodle on the web, similar to learning Mediawiki.