Link to my portfolio

Well we are winding down to the end of the semester, and our final assignment was a portfolio of all our class projects. Here's a link if you'd like to see how it looks. You may experience trouble with the link to WisePlus. I believe it's an issue with the site, and not with the link.

Hope you like my work.
http://www.pitt.edu/~mas274/SimonsMJ_LIS2600Portfolio.html

Creating a web site using Dreamweaver

This YouTube video discusses "Creating a Basic Web Site". It has some helpful hints about 4 types of websites, their purpose, and how to approach your design.

Portfolio

Image via Wikipedia

I've put together a portfolio of my work for this class using Dreamweaver, and I'm pleased with the results. I anticipated difficulty linking the assignments but I didn't have any trouble with the links. Of course, I may get a shock when I actually put it on to the server but for now I think it looks pretty good.

Oh, I see Zemanta has shown up again. It's been mia lately.

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CSS

Our most recent tech lesson has to do with CSS and style sheets. I found the (CSS) Zen Garden and I think it is a beautiful site with excellent style sheet examples available to its readers.

http://www.csszengarden.com/

Web page

I completed my web page using an external CSS style sheet without too much aggravation. I read through the very helpful tutorial reading assignments and I thought "I can do this". After a few false starts I did do it, and I thought it looked pretty good too.

Social media

I'm working on ideas using social media to attract customers to our children's book events. I ran across this quote to describe social media "it is simply about finding the best way to communicate with an audience. Social media consists of the same content already in use: text, audio, images, and video. The difference lies in its ability to open up new channels of communication." in an article from Digital Web magazine titled "Integrating Social Media into a Web Content Strategy" by Britt Parrott (http://www.digital-web.com/articles/
social_media_to_web_content_strategy/)

Reasons to Blog

I saw this on video on the LIS class blog, and I wanted to make sure I could find it in the future. It's from Teacher Tube and it's titled "Why Let Students Blog?".

http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=79778e9f140b78621d7f&msg
=You%20must%20be%20logged%20in%20to%20use%20the%20Feature
%20Video%20request

New job

I'll be graduating in December so I've started to look for a new job. I have quite a bit of experience teaching a variety of age groups from infants through adults, in a variety of lessons, from acclimating babies to the water to conducting financial literacy workshops. Now I would like to work in a public library setting, preferably as a children's librarian.

I enjoy working in the private as well as the public sector, so when I saw a posting for a children's manager at a local bookstore I applied for it. Much to my surprise I was offered the position and I'll begin next week! I'm excited and I think it will be a good opportunity for me. I'm looking forward to my new challenge.

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Digital Repositories: Development, implementation, and uses of digital repositories

Development, implementation, and uses of digital repositories is an assignment I am working on at this time. I really want to see what Zemanta suggests. OK, I am perplexed. Some of the images would have been very appropriate when I wrote about Zemanta originally. In fact, the images are better than what was suggested for the initial blog, but now I'd like to see relevant images for digital depositories. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I'd like to find a really good digital depository picture. ... Still nothing. Let me try a definition for a digital repository: "An online, searchable, web-accessible database containing works of research deposited by scholars. Purpose is both increased access to scholarship ..."
www.library.uiuc.edu/scholcomm/glossary.html

Still nada. Try: "An organisation that has responsibility for the long-term maintenance of digital resources, as well as for making them available to communities ..."
www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/redeflib/glossary/index.html

I don't think it's working well for this particular subject, so I'm not adding any of the images or links to articles.

Audacity

Image via WikipediaLet's try Zemanta with Audacity. Audacity is an audio editor. Dr. Tomer believes we will need to know how to produce videos. This time I think the image is ok and the articles are marginal, but I'm still intrigued.

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Zemanta for bloggers

Dr. Tomer always has something cool and new (to me at least) to share with the class. Today I learned about a plugin called Zemanta, which identifies additional images and articles that may be relevant to my post. Let's give it a try.

OK, the images don't appear to be relevant in this instance, but the articles seem to be. Still, pretty cool.

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Web design and 12 examples of Paragraph Typography

Plenty of good information here on paragraph styles for the web, and may be helpful for our 1st styling assignment for a web page:

The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design by Jon Tangerine

http://jontangerine.com/log/2008/06/the-paragraph-in-web-typography-and-design

..."The context, meaning and tone of web copy should always determine typographic style. Reading the text in full—or at least understanding what the text might be before styling it—is a pre-requisite. A common mistake is to allow the design to dominate the text: Design for design’s sake, or even worse, fashion’s sake."...

...."People experience the Web differently to print. The Web is not linear; in print people most often read sequentially, from front to back. They may flip, looking for something that catches their eye. After an initial look, they may skip back to interesting items using a table of contents or an index. On the Web this is reversed. Skipping to a certain page via the menu is habitual. This has been encouraged by bad design and web copy writing where inline links in the running text are sparse, if available at all."....

PDF's and Web design

Why PDFs Suck!
By Henny Swan.

This is an interesting article on PDF use on the web, and how design changes could have a positive impact on accessibility.

http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/pdf/why-pdfs-suck/

New Computers

Hooking up a new computer is always so much fun-not! I have a Gateway laptop that has served me well (about 9 years old) but as you can image it doesn't have enough memory and it's just way too slow even to start it up let alone work with any current applications. So I purchased an HP with Vista (I have been very happy with XP). It's a slimline and very attractive. I opened the box hoping to find detailed installation instructions, and as long as someone is picture literate I guess everything works out just fine, but I really prefer words when it comes to installation. I finally hooked everything up. Now if I can just figure out how to integrate it wirelessly into my home network. I'm wired in right now but I'd like to be wireless. Do I need a wireless LAN antenna?

Web Design

Our next set of assignments pertains to web design, and one of the assignments is to create an HTML page which represents a portfolio of our assignments. The readings are from W3 Schools. After I've read and studied their tutorials, I should have a beginning foundation in web design. Once again I am utterly amazed at the quality of free resources available on the web. I'm looking forward to constructing my portfolio.

Jing video for del.icio.us add on for Firefox

Exciting time for educators and librarians.

There are so many exciting applications available on the web that educators can use to enhance the learning process. Instructors that encouraging their students to utilize applications as simple as a blog or a wiki; try a brainstorming session on bubbl.us, or a media application such as Jing or Voicethread, can move students beyond the tedium of a traditional classroom and may even create a sense of enthusiasm for a learning! These applications have the power to engage students, encourage collaboration, and in time build knowledge in a way that will tend to remain with them far longer than traditional teaching methods. These same applications can be used by libraries to build traffic on their website, instruct patrons to effectively use the library, build a spirit of community, and more.

Secure VPN tales of frustration

Of course I’m trying to beat the deadline on an assignment, and I only have a small piece of it to finish, so it was put off till the last minute because I thought it would only take a few minutes to complete. Well it took hours! For some reason I had a terrible time logging in to the VPN. It took multiple attempts. Then the database I was using moved sooo slowly, and then it would freeze up. Result: start over again. All the log ins must be repeated. The search has to be re-entered only to have the database move sooo slowly and then freeze again and again. Then it started to storm and I just knew I would lose power. Well I finally finished it, and I think everything was done correctly.

Jing

Too much fun! We have an upcoming assignment asking us to use “Jing”. It’s hard to believe such high quality and incredibly useful applications such as Jing are offered free to users. If you are unfamiliar with Jing, it’s an application that allows you to “grab an image or record a video”, then you can annotate and share your captured image or video. Pretty neat way to present instructional materials, or help a friend understand how to navigate an application. Here’s the url. Check it out for yourself. http://www.jingproject.com/

"Open Source Learning"

I love "TED" (Technology, Entertainment, Design.), so many interesting and inspiring talks. In class we recently identified material on open source computing for education and/or libraries. Here's a fabulous video from TED on open source learning. Richard Baraniuk is a university professor at Rice, and the founder of Connexions-an open source repository of educational materials. It's open to anyone to use for learning and/or contributing. Enjoy the video.