On Design and Development

 My usual design principals for any piece of art I work on start and end with "follow your heart", but as that is not a studied and accredited design principal for websites, I had to use real ones. For my particular website, I utilized the CRAP design principal, not only because it is efficient and works well, but because I have the humor of a twelve year old, and telling myself that my website looks like CRAP just makes me giggle. When creating a legible site, it was important for me to follow the principals of high contrast design in order to make the website legible and easily navigable. For example, it was very important for me to have my posts aligned just so, so that they flowed well into one another and made sense; I feel my "Classroom Plans" page illustrates this principal very well. I prioritized aesthetics over contrast, however, and it made my page hard to navigate in a way I hadn't anticipated. At least what you could see looked pretty. A link for my website is available here:  Anne's Teacher Site

In my previous post, I stated my unwillingness to change with Diigo, like an old man on his rocking chair murmuring about some imagined good ol' days and yelling at wayward children on his lawn. I would like to state now that after working on a very intensive research project for my senior seminar that contained links upon links of different categories, I stand corrected. It has allowed me to organize my research in a manner that I would not have been able to on Google Docs. In addition, the connection aspect, while it is not something I am utilizing at the moment, can be invaluable on large-scale group projects (although I imagine I won't use it at all, because I despise group projects on the same level and with the same ferocity as old men hating children on their lawn).

As technology shifts and evolves, teachers need to take extra steps to be proactive in educating themselves on the latest tools to better communicate certain concepts to their students. As I was conducting research into the topic, I found a lot of useful resources that I felt could expand a teacher's repertoire. One I found was the ElevatED Conference Series, being held right here in Tallahassee over the summer and in partnership with Florida school districts. This two-day conference, covering topics such as the new B.E.S.T standards and maintaining teacher connections, could help educators expand both their PLN and their preparedness with the evolving educational standards in the state that could help the formulate better lesson plans.