Why so.

When I first looked at the Assessment section of the unit guide for EDN113 - Living and Learning with Technology, I immediately started to freak out. I read that for Task 1 I would have to do the following:

In Task 1 you will create a personal/professional website that you will use to present all your work in EDN113, and a blog to reflect on your learning throughout the semester. You will also research safe, ethical and responsible use of ICT in an online environment and create a set of digital guidelines for students.

(EDN113 Living and Learning with Technology Unit Guide)

In that moment my mind started to race with thoughts such as 'I'm not going to able to do that', 'I've never created a website before and I know nothing about how to create a website' and, 'They can't really expect us to do this can they'. I procrastinated starting my website and I really had no idea where to begin and how to go about this task. Eventually I checked out the Technology Toolbox, a resource which the Unit Co-ordinator Jenni Parker created, which has useful information and a list of possible choices to help guide us through the creation of our websites and blogs.

Unit Co-ordinator Jenni Parker

In the end I had three main choices for possible website builders - Wix, Webnode and finally the one I ended up going with Weebly. I began to research these sites and found a good tool to compare my choices - Website Tooltester. I looked at this site and found great reviews for each of the sites which I then used to make my final choice (WTT - Wix, WTT - Webnode, WTT - Weebly). I ended deciding on Weebly because of the reviews that the website tool tester gave me. It stated that Weebly had an overall rating of 4.9/5, where as Wix was 3.9/5 and Webnode 4/5. I also checked and and compared other features such as the Widget capabilities, storage space and, ease of use. Being a new website maker this was an important factor for me as I needed something that was going to be easy for me to use; Wix and Weebly both gave ease of use 5 star ratings where as Webnode was only 4/5 so I then eliminated that as a choice. The Weebly Review stated that there was unlimited storage space as against Wix which stated there was a maximum of 20GB storage space. I knew that this wouldn't be a huge factor for the purpose of the EDN113 tasks as even 20GB is a lot of space, but I decided to go with Weebly because it did have unlimited space which allowed for much greater use of my site for teaching purposes when I am a fully qualified teacher. 

As for my blog, it was suggested to me that I use Blogger. I tried out this tool and was initially a little confused about how to use it. After playing around with the tool and figuring out the workings of the site I became a little more confident and set out and created my blog using Blogger. At the end of my first post I encountered my first major problem - how to link an image to a particular website. I ended up using Google to find an answer pretty quickly. I read that the only way to link an image was to manipulate the HTML, upon reading these words my heart skipped a beat. I had never done anything with HTML and had no idea how it worked. However upon reading further down the page which I was reading -  http://www.cliveeaton.com/linkimagesinblogger.html, I discovered it wasn't really very technical and in fact quite easy to accomplish. 

So in my first blog post I had already learnt new skills which also benefited me in this post as well (linking the above image). Although I had learned how to link an image, I had problems actually putting the image in the blog post in the first place. I was initially using the Firefox Internet browser and when I clicked the add image button in the blog creation tools, nothing would load no matter how many times I tried. Upon switching over to Google Chrome and trying the same thing in this browser the option to upload an image appeared instantly. I do not know why this is the case but I must remember in the future I should construct blog posts in Chrome.

Already in the first few weeks of this course I have created a website, blog and learnt new skills such as HTML. I look forward to what else I will learn in this unit and what skills I will be able to transfer into my career as a primary school teacher.