Final Reflections on Final Project

Final Project Reflection

The final project is challenging. I have had to think about other peoples expectations. I have designed my website for my audience. My audience is not the whole of the internet but the staff at my school. I know the entire staff pretty well. This is an advantage and a sort of curse.
I see it as an advantage in that what I am creating would help our staff. Like other districts we have a need for a good ongoing and well supported professional growth program. To date is has been spotty convulsive and not well attended. Actually it has been attended but by the same people each time. Another advantage is that I can see ahead to where people will have questions. In the section where I talk about the hardware it takes to run whiteboard, I make it known that the board and the computer are sometimes used by others and they are not as responsible in returning important items such as LCD remotes. I also wanted to make clear the options for getting help. We are a small district and staff members who have been at the school for a number of years have forgotten that there are others who can help them.
There is also a disadvantage in knowing your audience. As the author of this site I want it to be iron clad and be as clear as possible. I don't want to be forever answering questions about it. I am asking for feedback in printed form so that I can make changes that will benefit everyone. If a person sits down to write a note about a change they would like they may decide that the change they are asking for is trivial. I also know that it is a work in progress, and needs to be maintained.
Certainly in creating this website I have gained respect for those who keep their pages up to date. I saw plenty of good sites or at least potentially good sites in disrepair while evaluating all those web-quests. I was also inspired to make a good set of questions that would inspire inquiry in my students. When I do a project in my own teaching I will have to consider how the questions challenge my students.
The new projects can come from the fantastic lists I read on my fellow students blogs. With the web 2.0 tools that are out there projects like a traditional web-quest could get a boost. Instead of making a paper and marker poster about the civil war, a Voice-thread could be made. I am not sure that a field trip into Second Life would be part of one of my projects, but I will follow that trend. I think there may be a potential for it still.
In commenting and having us all post to each others blogs I have been able to peek at what they were making. This was a prompt to find out how people created the webpages they did. It was nice to have the help sessions to get assistance. Dreamweaver may not be a software that I put into my applications folder but I am grateful for the experience of learning it. I have taught the importance of knowing where your 'stuff' is on a computer. In this exercise we had to keep to folders in two different places. I have heard some of the terms used around the internet while working on my project that I know will come in handy.