Evidence/Projects

• Portfolio Project for EDTEC 541
• Completed Design for Chemistry Website
• Revised Design for Chemistry Website

Context

My first semester as a student in Educational Technology I had the pleasure of taking EDTEC 541, Educational Multimedia Development with Dr. Bob Hoffman. The goal of the class was to create a website using a web development tool. There were two choices of programs which could be used to create a website. The two programs were either Dreamweaver or Weebly. Weebly was a web based webpage design tool with limited opportunity to learn the code (HTML) or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This limited opportunity to learn the base content of web design (writing HTML code) and grasp the use of CSS I decided to challenge myself and use Dreamweaver to build my website.

OUtcomes

IMy process of learning Dreamweaver began with the use of an online tutorial called Homer. The tutorial walked me through the following skills sets:

• Uniformity of webpage design using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Altering JavaScript based dropdown menus by Brothercake
• Modify HTML code
• Embed multimedia items such as Flash Animations and JPEG pictures.
• Develop Flash animations using Adobe Flash
• Modify photos using Adobe Photoshop

Using the tutorial I was able to create a template for a mock portfolio.

Challenges

After using the tutorial to hone my skills with Dreamweaver, I started from scratch to build my own site for my Chemistry class at La Costa Canyon High School. This would be a challenge. While using Dreamweaver it was often difficult to make the code look the same on different Internet Web Browsers. It took time to understand how to alter the code to work in the two most used web browsers (Internet Explorer and Mozilla).  This made me realize how important it was to make sure the looks of a web page would be similar across platforms because not everyone uses the same programs to maneuver the Internet.

Results/Growth

Building my finished Chemistry Website demonstrates my ability to learn a new program and apply information about web design to further projects. Since its creation my website has been streamlined for my parents and students to gather information about the courses I teach each year (Revised Website link). In furthering my ability to use new programs that are web based, I have integrated the use of Blackboard for my students to have central access to class information and formative assessments.