Project Four Independent Learning Technology Post Three

For my third post I will talk about Spruz.com. We were required to make out webpage about our topic on Spruz.com. Our group along with many other groups experienced problems with this domain. Beginning with the very first step of getting a membership to this website. Some people, including myself, had to try numerous times to submit a log in and password to gain access to this website. After acquiring a membership I then set up my personal profile, this is where I talked about my self and the reasons in why I decided to pick to discuss the topic of commercialization of children. AFter creating my personal profile we were to post our own individual blog post about a specific part of our topic. During this step I experienced difficulties when going to submit my blog post. After completing my blog post, I clicked the submit button, the next page was an error page, when I went back to try and re submit my post the post was deleted completely and not automatically saved. After finally posting my blog post we were to replay to another group members blog post, at this step I did not experience any problems. After this step we were to as group come up with the mission statement and welcome note for out website. Also in class we decided to change the theme of our webpage. There were some slight difficulties when trying to post both the mission statement and welcome note, but they were fixed shortly. The domain or Spruz.com also operated very slowly. Pages took forever to load, pages had to be refreshed constantly.

Project Four Independent Learning Technology Post Two

For my second log post I will tai about my specific component I talked about on our webpage. I decided to talk about the commercialization of children through food products. How people overlook the issues that this causes. In today's world parents replace babysitters with television. Today children are watching more t.v. then ever before, and the numbers continue to increase over the years. Since the television is now spending time with children rather then people, who could be playing with children and teaching them things, they are occupied by programs that attract their attentions. this is where the media strikes. Based on the tv shows the children watch the media decides where to play certain commercials that appeal to specific crows. The commercials played during children shows, typically appeal to children. Commercials for children also involve children. This is because if children see other children on television doing certain things, they as well will want to do those things. This is how the media sell their products. They are making children and entire class of consumers, not only now but also for later. Soon these children will be growing up, and as they grow up they are further influenced by the media. We need to protect the values of childhood. We need to prevent the increasing problems, such as the rise of child obesity, and get children involved in more knowledgeable activities.

Project Four Independent Learning Technology Post One

For my first blog post I will talk about the topic my group had decided to pick for project four. For this project, we were again divided into groups. In these groups we were to select a prominent issue in todays world. An issue that we are personally interested in and want to discuss. For my group we chose the topic of the commercialization of children. We thought that the commercialization of children is a growing issue in the US, and that it does not receive enough awareness. Our main goal was to spread the awareness of this uprising problem. We talked about six different aspects of the commercialization of children, and how each one of these aspects are a part of the problem. While researching out own topic we were also required to complete an assignment, which was creating a webpage for the groups issue. The webpage should provide certain information that discussed the groups specific topic. We thought that the commercialization of children is important because now a days the television is such an important factor in our world. If children are being apart of media, it can potentially cause problems within our younger generations. We thought that by trying to spread awareness we would be able to stop this upcoming issues.

Project Three: Independent Learning Technology Post Five

For my last process blog post I will talk about my opinion about this project. For this project we were required to work in a group, in college group projects tend to be a little more difficult or more stressful. Also working with a group and with a new program was a little tricky. I did like how we were able to communicate through the  separate forum groups on sakai to converse with my group members. For group projects though, being able to work together in class is crucial. There was a good amount  time for class work provided, but it college things tend to move ten times faster. I liked working with Wordpress, although frustrating at times it was interesting to learn the different components of the website. Learn how to make a website and change the entire format of a pre existing website. Being able to analyze poor websites was also interesting because you were actually able to get a good look at how many horrible websites are out there. Before this class I would have over looked all the negative aspects of the website and just looked for the information I was searching for. I didn't realize how much better the website would be if it just provided the audience with the information they were looking for. This what we tried to do when redesigned Kingston Pizza website, redesign the site based on the information that an audience member would be interested in.

Project Three: Independent Learning Technology Post Four

For my fourth post for this project, where we had to use the website wordpress.com I will talk about the  components of the website that I was unfamiliar with. First with when working with Wordpress, I was unfamiliar with the theme selection process. As a group member I took it upon myself to start designing our website for the redesign of Kingston Pizza, the first step in that process would be to pick out a theme for the web page. The selection was narrowed because some of themes needed to be purchased to be used. I decided to pick a rather simplistic theme because for a pizza place we thought that as group, the webpage didn't need to be cluttered with any extra information or "stuff". After picking the theme, working with editing all the aspects of the theme was different for me and for us as a group.  To make the webpage represent our idea of our redesign we started editing all the basic components, before adding in all the information actually needed for the website. The basics involved changing the title of the webpage, also adding a sub title, fixing the color schemes of the pages, assigning tabs the proper labels, and adjusting page measurements. while trying to find the editing option for the basics I was able to find all of the listed above along with some other components of the webpage where we would need to go back into to add information. Being unfamiliar with the website was time consuming and sometimes frustrating. Eventually were we able to edit all of the basic components of the webpage and also add in all the information we decided to include in the redesign. When adding in information and picture there were certain parts that we needed to fix after the first upload. For example, after uploading information we had to adjust the alignment of the text and the pictures so that they would align correctly with the rest of the page. By working and adding information to Wordpress, each member of the group was able to explore the program and learn how it works.

Project Three: Independent Learning Technology Post Three

For my thirst post for project three, I'm going to talk about the components of our website. Our redesigned website for Kingston Pizza. We decided to arrange our information in a  number of page tabs. The tabs were the home page, the menu tab, the location tab, a tab for URI, and the about us tab. We thought as a group these tabs appropriately displayed the information included. We thought the original website had to much going on, there was too much information for a pizza website. We narrowed the information and only displayed the information we thought the website needed. We edited the about me section the most. For a pizza place all the background knowledge about the website is not what the audience is looking for. For the menu tab we decided to take the uploaded picture of the menu out, and write out the menu. The uploaded menu was unclear and some items on the menu were unreadable. It was hard to make out most of the items. Our menu consisted of all the items, prices, and descriptions. The URI tab consisted of deals offered to URI students, and information about kingston pizza for URI, also had picture of the Kingston Pizza mascot actively involved with students.
The locations tab had all of the locations of kingston pizza along with the addresses and phone numbers. The home page had Kingston Pizzas' main location information, which is located on the URI campus. Also a picture of some pizza for attraction for the audience. The home page was very basic, but we wanted to get straight to the point. The main goal of a pizza places website should be to gain more costumers, not over crowd your website with information they are not interested in.

Project Three: Independent Learning Technology Post Two

For project three as a group and an individual we were required to use the program Wordpress. Generally I got a hold of how to work the website but there were also a few confusing elements. There were also restrictions on certain elements in the site since we are using the program for free. Another one of the problems we were having as a group was dealing with the pictures we wanted to add to the site. It was difficult working with word press in this case because we weren't able to get the spacing and the sizing correct for the pictures. We tried many different things to try to get the image on the home page to a certain size and were unable to edit the format. All we were able to do was adjust the alignment of the picture to either the left, right, or center. Unfortunately we were unable to depict the design we wanted but the design we decided on we thought was the best for the settings we were given. Adding pictures to certain tabs and pages took some playing around with. It would have been better if we were able to adjust a picture to the background but the program didn't offer us that option. It either offered for one picture to be in the background stationed in the left corner of the page and stretched to as big as the original picture, or it offered the option to block the image which made many duplicates of the image as the background. As a group we did not think that blocked imaging looked good for our website.