Journal #6: Reflections on Professional Learning Networks

The Affinity group that I chose and have been monitoring is Classroom 2.0.  I have found it interesting because there are a variety of discussions on all sorts of subjects that have to do with using technology in the classroom plus anything to do with classroom teaching.  There are article on classroom furniture design as well as technology integration in preschool.  I especially enjoyed an article on three sites to help students move from the classroom to career as I’m trying to help my son start his career coming out of college.

I’m enjoying the feeds I’m receiving in DIGG.  For sports, I don’t have search through all my sites to find articles about the Red Sox or Celtics or Bruins or Patriots. More importantly, I’m finding websites that pertain to my more recent interests in technology and multimedia.  I recently read an article on O’Reilly Radar titled “A connected world is a better world. Right? By Jim Stogdill.  He compares the changes we’re going through now are similar to the industrial revolution that occurred 150 years ago.  Major changes is social interactions worldwide are occurring and that can be good or bad.

 

Professional Learning Networks are useful to better understand not only your own interests, but scan areas that you may never of thought of approaching.  It’s so easy to browse topics and exchange ideas with people in your own town as well as people across the planet with twitter.  I can easily communicate with people who may have the same interests as myself.  By focusing on very specialized Affinity groups or specific categories of RSS feeds, I can spend less time on browsing for information and get better information that will help me with my personal and professional development. 

Journal #5: Reflections on the first 5 weeks of Web Design

I found the first five weeks of learning HTML and the very beginning of CSS to be interesting.  After spending some time with other languages, I thought HTML would have its similarities to programming languages I’m familiar with such as C++.  But, HTML is not a programming language.  It is a “mark up” language.  A programmer uses tags and attributes to define the structure of information to be interpreted by a web browser.  It doesn’t have conditional phrases such as “if / then /else.  It doesn’t handle events or carryout tasks.  But it’s great at what it does and with the addition of CSS that handles how the data is presented, these tools become very powerful in sending and receiving information instantly worldwide.

My experience has not helped me understand HTML but it has helped me better structure a document with indentations and comments.  CSS can be very helpful whereby you can create one CSS document to style multiple HTML documents.  What I’d like to also learn is how we can create one document with common text to be used on all documents such as headers and footers.

Of the assignments to date, I found the table exercises to be the more difficult ones.  It can get confusing when setting up rows and columns correctly.  I enjoyed working on assignments that use images such as the Tuscany one in Chapter 7.  Web pages change dramatically when you bring in images.