Week 13

Our team had a very productive evening in class on May 3rd. Erica and I spent time working on our final document and Mary and Kate worked on the design of the web pages. Kate and I were able to meet with Joel from 826 on Friday, May 4th and talked about what our plans were for handing over the final product to him and the progress that had been made. We talked about adding a page that explained cybersafety and netiquette to the kids who will use the site. Kids would be routed to this page before entering their personal profile. We also talked about making the site "live" this week so we can test it out before turning it over to 826. All in all, we had a productive few days and I think everyone feels better about our project.

Week 11 and 12

We aren't having class tonight, but since last week's class my group members and I have met to discuss our project with 826 Valencia. At last week's class we did make a plan and showed off some of the screens that Mary and Kate had developed. Since then, we met on Tuesday evening and clarified the contents we would like to see on the screens, Kate showed us her storyboard, Mary got information she needed from Kate and the rest of us. Erica took notes and all of us discussed what needed to be done, including deadlines for finishing different parts of the project. All of us are to be looking for graphics to use as buttons on the site. Next week in class we will be showing our first version of the pages and talking a bit about where we are headed. We have a meeting scheduled with Joel at 826 next Friday to show him our first draft and possibly try it out. We will be aiming to have everything done, in terms of the paper and a prototype by May 10th so we will have a week to tweak it if necessary. See you all next week!

Spring "Break"?

Well, classes are about to start up again and though I haven't had to attend in the last week, I can't say it felt much like a break! I worked a lot on my paper for 801 and went to work every day! Mary, Erica and I did get to meet with Joel at 826 Valencia and got some good information from him on what he would like to see in the project we are working on for 826. We have an initial deadline set for May 4th, so we are moving right along!

Play? Mary, Erica and Deb's VLOG

Finally got our vlog loaded and here it is!

Thanks to Dave from ITEC 830, fall 2006 for your loading instructions!

Week 10

Not much to report this week. I hope some of you in class got something out of my presentation on GIS - I know it is pretty technical and narrow in terms of what it might have to offer to most people. I have to say that I learned a lot researching GIS. As a kind of a science nerd, I find it fascinating and actually pretty cool in what it can do. I think that it definitely is an explanation for the power behind GoogleEarth and I appreciated Darren's presentation on that . . . cool stuff! For anyone interested, I do think that ESRI offers links to ArcVoyager workshops for teachers.

I understand now that we are expected to go through a mini-version of the instructional design process for our project. We are somewhat in a holding pattern now as our contact is away for the week. But we have all been doing some work. I have looked into Drupal and a little into eLGG as alternatives to Moodle, but I don't really have the technical knowledge to know which might be better for our purpose. They all seem to offer about the same thing in terms of free, open-source sharing sites. Our purpose is to create a site where young folks from various cities can share their creative writing in a protected environment with a person who would act as site administrator. The idea is not to solely have a blog, but to have forums for sharing. If anyone who reads this is familiar with anything other than Moodle for this purpose, please respond.
I feel that at the very least we will be able to get something started for 826 Valencia that will hopefully lead to something really powerful for them to complement their tutoring centers.

I am about to try and load that vlog from a few weeks ago, on behalf of Erica, Mary and I, so we shall see . . .

Week 9 (at the last minute)

As you all know, we did not meet last week as a class. However, our project group - Mary, Kate, Erica and I - met for a few Margaritas and a bit of food to discuss what our plans are for our project.
Erica has posted a number of things for us on Google.docs, such as meeting minutes, etc. Mary has started a blog site for us on blogger, entitled 826 Valencia, and we have pretty much decided on roles.
We were to have met Joel from 826 Valencia yesterday to discuss next steps and share some ideas with him, but unfortunately he had to cancel. We will try to meet with him the week that we are on break and in the meantime we all have assigned tasks to complete before our meeting. Things are looking good!
I have not reloaded our video blog to blogger. Suffice it to say that it is on iLearn and I will load it withing the next week.

Week 8

This past Thursday, it was fun to watch everyone's vlog on Pink's content - I especially enjoyed Peter's and Ben's. I have just uploaded mine, but am a bit nervous that the content is not okay because it is from images we got from Google images and screenshots of websites. I would have gladly loaded it onto the SFSU server and then streamed it from there, but we have not gotten instruction in this. Does anyone have feedback on this. If it is not kosher, then I would rather delete my video from You Tube and make another that is okay.
Erica's presentation on Google.docs was also informative. I had not been aware that such a thing was available.
I was glad we got a few minutes to talk about our project with Dr. Foreman. I am anxious to get started with this part of the class.