I have to say that this was one of the most challenging and time consuming
projects that I’ve ever worked on. Mostly this was due to the fact that I was
basically starting from scratch in terms of using Moodle and creating web
pages. With that being said, I’ve also wanted to learn how to build a web page
from scratch, and I’ve also noticed that Moodle is being used more and more in
our school and our district, so this was definitely a very useful learning
experience.
When I was first starting to put together the web pages, I had two options: Dreamweaver
and Microsoft FrontPage. After experimenting with each for a while, I decided
on FrontPage. It appears as though Dreamweaver is a much more powerful program,
but FrontPage seemed easier for me to figure out. This is probably due to the
fact that I’m pretty comfortable with Microsoft programs, and tend to find
Adobe programs tougher to grasp. I will probably try working with Dreamweaver in
the future, but I wanted to be sure that I would be able to finish this
project.
I found a lot of the basic aspects fairly simple. Graphic overlay, formatting
text, and hyperlinking were all somewhat problem free. Where I had a lot of
difficulties was in keeping everything organized. Managing all of the files was
challenging, and it seemed like a lot of things were quite finicky. Images
wouldn’t show up, colours would be off, and various other little things
frequently didn’t work. I ended up restarting the webpage a number of times
with different organizational structures until I finally found one that worked,
though it is still a little messy.
I also had some troubles with managing Moodle. Placing the graphics, managing
text, and adding basic components weren’t too bad, but a lot of the things that
were a little more complex I had some problems with. I think that this was
largely due to the fact that a lot of the information on Moodle was for Moodle
2.0, and I either couldn’t find equivalent information, or the functions were
not available for Moodle 1.9. I was however, pretty happy with the tests that I
made in Moodle. The earlier assessment assignment was very helpful, and I think
that the assessment options for making tests in Moodle are very good.
For me, I think that the best part of this activity was seeing the sites that
everyone else came up with. It is pretty clear that a number of people in this
class have either used Moodle/built webpages before, or are very talented
designers. I was able to see a number of very good designs, and clever ideas.
Many of the sites integrated everything very seamlessly, and I appreciate the
opportunity to see all of those high quality products.