Classroom Website

 I created a classroom website in my TPTE class at the beginning of the school year. We had not really done much with the sites in class since first making them. That is until this week. This week on Tuesday the assignment was to work on fixing our websites at home (my class was canceled).

 Prior to the class I was not even aware that Google sites existance, so believe it or not the only experience I have had with creating a website has been in this class. For this reason I was very nervous about doing construction on my website without my teacher near by to help me. So, I went to the library to work on my project, since I figured someone there would be able to help me if I needed assistance.

As I was working on my website I was pleasantly surprised; I though everything was simple to do. The experience I had gotten in class using the site had completely prepared me for this assignment. Though, the simple layout of this site by Google may have helped some, too. For me to do this assignment by my myself, and with such ease (with my technological skills) means that anyone can create their own site!

When I have my own class I definitely want to create a site similar to this one for the children and their families to use. I think it would make them feel like they knew me better. Also, if I put up my contact information here this would allow them to easily access it even when they were not home, and nix any chances of them losing my information.This site would provide the families with learning resources, materials and information that would they could find whenever as well. A classroom website will be such an asset for communicating with parents, and with how easy it is to create there is no excuse for me to not have one.

Digital Images

This week in TPTE 486 we learned about digital images. We did this by creating our own scavenger hunts, and then going on one that had been previously created by our teacher. While doing this we had to add pictures on to a photo sharing site called Picsa. I had never used a picture sharing website, so this was something new for me. Also, I did not know all the rules involved with digital pictures. This activity was a really fun way to learn about this topic.

The scavenger hunt that I created was titled Things You Can Find at the Zoo. In this I added a variety of pictures of things I found on the picture sharing site called Pics4Learning where people put up pictures for others to use. I found these pictures by putting in words that described the picture I wanted. These pictures have been tagged by users with these words, so that people could find them. Then, once I had all the pictures I wanted I named them using simple descriptions and put them in a folder on my desktop, so that they would be easy to find later.

The scavenger hunt that I went on this past week was an ABC scavenger hunt. I and three others had to take pictures of things that started with each letter A-L. We used another member of the groups camera when we did this, because hers was the most up-to-date. This was important to do, because we wanted the pictures to be high quality. Once we had all the pictures we then uploaded them to Picsa album, and tagged them with descriptive names. This was kinda of difficult, because there were so many different words I could use. Lastly, I made this album public, so that the world could see my pictures.