Purrfection’s Weblog

Alright I’ve finished my site.  I’m not sure if it’s exactly where I want it to be.  I think if I could redo anything I would have added in more animation with my pages.  That’s just something that I didn’t get a chance to get to since it took longer then I thought to get the front page animation to work.  Even now I think that maybe it’s a little to fast, but I’ll wait and get some feedback before I change it.  It was a long process, but I think I got across that fun feeling that I wanted it to have.

Solar Discovery

Well it’s been a journey trying to remember how to build a site using flash.  I’ve got a lot done so far.  The only thing missing from my site it that wow factor.  I’m missing my beginning animation.  I want you to be able to click on a planet in the solar system and have that planet do a amination into the page.  It’s been my biggest worry about getting that to work.  I think that’s probably why I’ve put it off to the end.  Without that extra something I think my site falls short of communicating the feel that I wanted.  So keep your fingers crossed that it all works out.

Flash Animations

As I’ve discussed in class I want to do some sort of animation on the home page.  I want it to be so that when you click on a planet on the home page it plays a transition into that single planet page. Now in order to accomplish this in the way I see it in my head I think I’m gonna need some help.  So that’s why I sought out some tutorials that could better give me some ideas on how to do it. A site that I found useful was about.com . They give lots of examples and I’m sure I can take one of their tutorials and build upon it.

What about a Quiz?

So I also want to incorporate quizzes into my site. I was on a quest to see if I could find some sort of generator that could make that part of the site go quicker.  I found a site that seemed to do just that called, ClassTools.net . They have lots of templates to choose from and plenty of examples to help you on how to incorporate them.  I’m really planning on using one of the templates. The game/quiz I’m leaning more towards is a flashcard sort of game where you could match the planet with a description on it.

Going from Actionscript 2.0 to Actionscript 3.0

I’m planning on building my whole site in flash. In going this route I want to make it using actionscript 3.0.  This might make it a little more time consuming for me considering I’m not all that familar with actionscript 3.0.  It’s a big step for me and I thought it would be useful to see the differences between actionscript 2.0 and 3.0. So in that case I found a site that lists out what’s changed from adobe. I think it’s worth a look from anyone who learned actionscript 2.0.  I’m also looking into getting a book over this stuff to help and relying a lot on tutorials.

I ended up going onto the Open University web site and taking a class.  The class that I took was over Global Warming.  Thank goodness that I was interested in the topic because other then that they make it hard to want to stay on the site and keep learning more.  It was very text heavy with little graphs and diagrams to follow along with.  The greatest thing was this Climate Model that was designed using flash.  It actually let you go in and change some of the variables affecting the climate and see how that one change would affect everything else including the climate.  In the lesson it would actually break up the sections by activities.  I didn’t find it a good idea to prepare a presentation with supporting facts and such.  That activity seems like it requires too much work especially if you’re the only one going to see this presentation.  Where’s the fun at?  Some of the other activities were a little more insightful and straight forward.  I like that they reienforced what you just learned or read.  This class would have helped me learn more if it just included at least one video.  Yes, some people learn just fine by reading all this stuff, but what about those who need to see it, or those who have to do it to learn it?  I want to listen to one of those classes on iTunes University and see how I like those.  More to come later!

Ning:

I don’t know where to start about using Ning.  It has so many things you can do with it.  I love how it’s set up when you create your own social network.  The ease of creating your own page is awesome and very eye appealing.  All you have to do is click and drag and you control how your social network and viewed and ultimatley interacted with.  I like all of that freedom and that got me to thinking about what if you could customize your learning environment to better suit your learning style.  What if the first page on a e-learning site let you pick the layout of how you wanted information given to you and if you wanted quizzes at the end or middle of reading content or even not at all?  Having that kind of control over the information seems very appealing to me.  It’s making something that’s your own and you can apprecitate it a little more.  I found a great article about Ning and how it’s a viral expansion loop and that’s what helps it to keep growing.  It’s sort of long, but worth a look at.  If we could figure out and use the same tactics that they used in Ning then we would all have successful sites with the number of viewers growing constantley.  That would be a great thing.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/125/nings-infinite-ambition.html?page=0%2C0

Mashups:

Mashups offer a good way of compiling a lot of information into one without it coming off completely overwhelming.  That’s a good idea to keep in mind when building an e-learning site.  You want to bring in all this information, but it needs to be done in  a way that does not make the user want to go to another site where it’ll be easier to find what their looking for. One of the sites I liked was pricegrabber.com just because of the nice layout and organization of the site.  I hope I can organize my information successfully on my future site.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-mashups.html

Skype:

I’ve seen Skype a lot recentley on tv being used by Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, Court TV Shows, and even Oprah! You know that you’ve made it big when Oprah is using the service. What Skype allows you to do is make phone calls, conference calls, video calls, instant messageing, seeing who’s online, etc.  It’s a new way to stay in touch and relatively cheap to make phone calls for those non-skype users.  I’m not really sure how to incorporate this kind of new technology into an e-learning site.  I guess an obvious kind of use would be to maybe host live lessons over the web.  Promote a certain time and date to give users a chance to come online and get a interactive learning experience over the web.  Maybe you could have life video of someone searching through a telescope for the next big eclipse. Not so sure.  Here’s an article to learn more about the background of Skype and how it works.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/08/04/whatisSkype.html

Okay, so many have caught onto the fact that I want to build an e-learning site focusing on the solar system.  It’s a topic I’ve always been drawn to since I was younger. I can just see it in my head using  flash to make an interactive universe where the planets rotate as you click on them to give you more information.  From the sites I’ve seen I tend to lean more towards the ones that give you the best of both worlds as in interactivity and just giving the information straight to you in text.  My biggest concern is that with this site I want it to be fun.  I want users to want to come back even after learning the marterial just because it’s a awesome fun site that’s not easy to get bored with.  This could be a challenge especially with my topic.  I mean I think it’s really cool to learn about the solar system, we’re forever learning knew things about it.  Although not everyone feels the same…some think it’s lame.  Those are the people I want to impress too.  I want to make learning fun so you don’t feel like you’re being forced to learn something.  I could always try to go the route and try to trick people into learning like those little kids games you play and have a great time, but at the same time you’re learning how to do math or read.  Lot’s of thoughts going on in my head at the moment…what do you think?

ehow.com

This is a great site on showing you how to do things.  They give you the opportunity to read articles on the subject, watch videos, even post your own experiences on the site.  In order to share your experinces you do have to have an account.  I just really fell in love with the fact that you could choose the way you received information.  That makes a big difference.  You can also search through a variety of topics and find the one that best fits you.

howstuffworks.com

This site like the one before it allows you to search for topics of interest and also lets you pick your delivery of the information.  The videos are really great and high quality.  I’m not certain, but I do think that they might redirect you to another site for the videos.  They had so many videos for the topic I searched for which was the solar system.  There are lots of different sub categories that you can choose from to get more specific on a topic.  There also quizzes under some subjects to help discover just how much you’ve learned.

Astronomy Class Site

This is a professor’s class site that I stumbled upon.  He has some good lectures and diagrams to go with them.  He also provides links to internet resources to go along with the lectures.  If you were actually taking the class there are online quizzes available, but since I’m not I can’t get into them.

Lady K Interactive

This site did not have all of it’s interactive parts working correctly, but if they did work it wouldn’t be that bad of a place to learn about the Solar System.  There was this one page where you were suppose to have to ability to click and drag the names of the planets with actual photos, but that didn’t work.  Through the site it’s set up to go through three lessons. First you read up on the planets, play the matching game of the planets, and then take a quiz.  I kind of get what they were going for, but the execution wasn’t good at all.

W3Schools

This site I’m sure we’re all familiar with, it’s hard to miss going to this school.  The best thing about learning stuff through the site is how they actually let you modify the code that they give you as an example to truly understand what it’s doing.  They also have quizzes you can take to test yourself and provide you with lots of resources.