Wireframes and Sitemaps - Oh my!

My Plan for the week:

Although I have written this post following the work necessary for class, I plan on looking at other Web 2.0 applications to host my website. As required, I signed up for the Weebly website and I like the looks of most of the pages but they seem to be so simple and not exactly what I was looking for. This week, I will be reading a bit more about technology processes in the classroom and incorporating website usage with my students. In addition, I have decided I will use a few flipped classroom ideas this next year to aid in completing the curriculum with time left in the school year. With this in mind, I have been researching the best ways to record video to be used and will probably be putting these types of videos on my website. I'm sure my accelerated students will take advantage of this type of lesson.  I hope my regular class will, as well. In addition, my classroom rules didn't seem to take as well as I wanted  last year - I need to redo them and create a poster board or two to be used throughout the classroom. School doesn't start until August 26, so I have plenty of time. 

What I did/Where I went:

I enjoyed my summer off. I didn't do much but made plans for this coming week. I own a 2013 26 foot camper trailer and want to use it at some point. I researched places to go that will get me out of the Las Vegas heat and have decided on a state park in Arizona. The temperatures (weather.com) claim to be 20 degrees lower than the floor of the nearest city. I hope this is true and it doesn't rain the whole time I'm out. I will be leaving on Sunday morning and will return on Tuesday. I have class on Monday and Tuesday so I will need to travel for wifi to attend my classes - not a big deal, I've been doing this for the last year of my Master's degree. 

What I learned:

This last week, I have learned some things about technology I never knew. I had to create a wireframe for my soon-to-be website and a sitemap. When I first started, I was confused at the difference between the two. I guess, I was thinking more on an English professor level. When I teach my students to write, I always encourage some type of outline and there are usually some issues but overall a decent creation of "pre-ideas" they would like to use. The sitemap was fairly easy to create. I used PowerPoint to create the sitemap and then saved it as a PDF. For those of you looking to create a sitemap, be sure you adjust the design on your PowerPoint to reflect the size you would like your sitemap to be saved as. I was fortunate in that I was tasked in the past with creating a presentation by using PPT. I have used Microsoft Publisher in the past but forgot about it until I started the initial creation of my sitemap so decided to go forth. 
Building my website from the bottom up wasn't as difficult as I originally thought. When creating lesson plans, it is always important to understand the goal you are trying to accomplish. Because my mind tends to work in this manner, when reading about building my website from the bottom up, it was easy to understand. This week, I read about using the cloud to save documents. I have been using dropbox for at least two years. I have shared my knowledge with as many people as I can (plus it gives me more space!). I do like google drive and that it saves my documents as they are created but I am unable to use this on my work computer so I stick to dropbox when possible. When creating my wireframe I read Erez Zukerman's website at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/website-wireframe-develop-website/ to understand more and to gather ideas necessary for creating my wireframe. I learned in this reading about the different programs you can use for creating a wireframe and mostly, I realized how this program can be used to create just about anying - lesson plans, presentations, etc. 

What I decided for my website: 

I have decided that I will use weebly for my website. Although I don't necessarily find any certain page of great value, I will make it work. I believe I am going to look into buying my own domain name so my kids don't have to type in .weebly.com each time they want to go to the classroom website. I'm thinking the domain name of www.brasserscience.com. I found it was available and considering the purchase for hosting. There are so many different website creators out there, I know there is one that I will be completely satisfied with but for ease of creation, it looks like weebly will be it. When creating my wireframe and my sitemap, I realized how many pages I would like on my website. I believe it is going to be a challenge mostly in the lesson page. I need to upload many different links to assignments and they need to have the names changed so my students will understand what they are looking at. In addition, I have decided to use photos and videos on my website and need to research the best media to use to grab their attention without overwhelming the pages.