KamanKaman

Hi Hi~~~

I want to let you guys preview my online shop. Please tell me what you guys think! Any suggestions to how I can improve it? The stuff on the site are made by my sister and me.

Click here to enter KamanKaman

Weebly and Online Shop

During break, I've decided to do what I've wanted to do for a long time - to start an online shop selling accessories that I make. I remember at the last class we had, we learned about Weebly. I thought it looked really cool and seemed like you can customize your blog a lot more than blogger allows. So I went on the site and started playing around with it. I'm still learning about it, but from what I have played with, it seems like there are advantages and disadvantages to both. For one, weebly allows you to create a website AND a blog. The designs are more professional looking as well. The only thing is, you can't really choose any other fonts. With Google page creator, you have a lot more font options and what not. Weebly offers a lot of options that are very convenient if you are technology savy and like to set a lot of media on your site/blog. They have a YouTube link, a custom html button, right there on your palette. So, as I was playing with the site, I thought that I could easily build an online shop on my own using weebly and the best part is that it's entirely free. BUT it wasn't as easy as I thought, I had to learn how to set a shopping cart, how to add a "Add to Cart" button, etc. But I googled it and went to various bookstores and read "Online Business for Dummies". I learned that paypal allows me to do all of that. Long story short, creating this online shop made me learn a lot more about site building and whatnot. It is A LOT of work, but I am starting to get the hang of it. I will post it for you guys to see once I have it ready for people to browse (if you guys still use blogger that is!).

My First Stab at Sketchcast!

Collaborative Technologies

We learned about some great collaborative technologies in class last Tuesday, such as online conference sites (e.g. Yugma, Vyew, etc.) and collaborative note taking tools such as Google Docs and NoteMesh.

I think the online conferencing sites are extremely convenient, but it seems to be limited to older students. I think it would be a great tool for college students to use for group projects. College students are known to be very busy and group projects are often really difficult to do, because it's hard to meet up at a certain place. With Yugma or Vyew, students can do so in the comfort of their home. It makes life so much more convenient and it's a lot better than everyone hovering over one computer screen.

Notemesh and Google Docs are great tools for teachers that support collaborative learning. Students can write notes together. It can be edited why any member of the group. I like this idea, but I see an issue that may happen with this. A student might accidentally delete another person's note or edit it without permission, but since it rarely happens, I think that these collaborative note taking technologies are worth trying.

Online Portfolio presentation audio

You can listen to my online portfolio presentation last Tuesday. It's quite embarrassing to listen to.

Copyright

I learned so much in class on Tuesday. It was very exciting to know that there are so much free material I can use in my future classrooms and even now for personal or academic purposes.

The most important thing I learned regarding the use of images, copyright, mashing, etc. is that there are many creative people out there that is willing to share their work for others to use. I've always used just images online without knowing the copyright laws, etc. Although I am not using any of the resources I find on the internet as commercial use, it is still against the law. Like Fei described in class, most people just ignore it and I was one of those people. Now that I know that there are so many great material out there from site like FlickrCC, Creative Commons, Animoto, etc., I do not have to use the mediocre copyrighted material from search engines. Another thing I learned that I think will be very helpful for teachers is that they can have access to material that they can modify for their own classroom. For me to be able to use my own images is very important. Teachers can make their own video or slideshow with their own photos, alter pictures they find on sites like FlickrCC or Creative Commons, etc. The possibilities are endless. I also think that being able to my own images or the images my students create in a class to make something new using one of the programs we have learned about in class can create more personal projects.

I think with so many options these days, it would be a challenge to help the students learn all the programs. They may be overwhelmed with how to approach all the material they are finding. I also think that teaching the different types of copyrights there are could also be a challenge. For example, which images they can alter, which ones they have to cite, etc. If I were a teacher trying to teach my students how to use images more critically, I would teach each program and copyright type at a time so that they wouldn't be overwhelmed.

Animoto

This is my first attempt at animoto. The photos are from my digital photography creative process class from my sophomore year.