Final Reflection: Exploring Web

What I Learned

Technology

I came into this year with a pretty basic knowledge of what I was doing in web design. I ended up being one of the only people who could make a working website for our final project last year, so I figured I should give the class a shot and see if I liked it. I ended up learning a lot and making some works that I'm really proud of. One such example is my rollover site, that in my opinion looks really clean, and I enjoyed learning how to make it. We learned so much over the course of the year, and I can honestly say I took significant knowledge away from this class. I'm glad I got to extend the knowledge I previously had with the minimal amount of web design I learned last year and enjoyed doing it along the way.

Collaboration

There wasn't much collaboration throughout the course of the year. This has been a pretty solitary class, which I don't mind at all. It was my biggest struggle in video because I'm such a solitary worker. This class was a good fit for me in that way because I could work by myself and only take responsibility for my own work.

Communication

Despite there not being much collaboration, there was a significant amount of communication. Whether that was with my classmates or my teacher, I had to talk to people all the time. There were people in the class who knew a lot more than I did, and even though it hurt my pride a little, I asked for help when I needed it. (Thanks Ethan!!) I also had to communicate with Mr. Olson through email at times. Even though there wasn't as much communication as was needed in video, I still used it throughout the year, and mustered up the courage to ask for help when I didn't understand something, which has been a struggle for me in the past.

Project Management

I tried to do a lot of my work outside of class. This was probably pretty confusing for my teacher, but I have some good reasoning. I have a much better knowledge of the version of Dreamweaver that I have on my laptop, so working outside of class was much easier for me. There were probably days where it looked as if I was not doing much, but I always worked hard behind the scenes. I would often create content if that was required of me in class, and then would do the actual site building at home. That was just what worked for me. Transferring the files was a bit of a challenge at times, but I would always manage to figure it out. Overall I would say I had solid project management, even if I had a skewed process.

Leadership

Because there was not much collaboration to be had in this class, I can't say that I improved in a major way in the leadership category. I also wasn't one of those students who knew a ton about the class coming into it so I couldn't help out my classmates like some have done for me. In video, I would say my leadership skills got more of a chance to shine, but in here they weren't really applied. This wasn't a problem for me because I am more of a solitary worker than anything.

Strengths and Weaknesses

I don't know that I would say I have specific strengths in this class, but overall I would say I have enough technical ability to call that a strength. I get my work done and when I finish with it, I like the results. I think I produce work that is clean and is something I'm proud of. Even though I don't possess the skills that some of my classmates do, I think that I have good technical ability in general. I guess I could say that my project management was a weakness for me because I had such an awkward process: working some at home and some at school. If it seemed as though I wasn't working, I was doing a lot at home. Because of this weird process, sometimes my work did not get turned in on time because I had trouble relinking all the files and uploading it to the server, which is something I wish I could just do from my computer, but what I did worked. I can't speak for the other areas because there wasn't much application of them in this class as a whole, so I can't say that any of them were a real strength or weakness.

Application

The strand I am going into next year is journalism, so I most likely won't have much use for the skills that I learned this year in web design. There is a website for that class so I may have to use them to make edits or solve problems regarding that. In my personal life, however, I can see myself using the web design skill that I cultivated this year to make websites for my own personal use.

What Would I Change?

Overall, I wish that I had more knowledge of web design coming in, especially from my freshman year. I wish that it was stressed more heavily than the other strands because having a better grasp for it would have helped me a lot. I also wish that I did not have such a backwards process of creating websites because it would be better to get all my work done at school rather than save some for home.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed this class. Often I would look forward to it more than any other classes because it was just so fun. It was a great way to let my creativity flow in a productive way, and learn some skills that will help me in the future. Even though I am not going into the web design strand for my junior and senior years, I still will look back on my days in exploring web design fondly, becuase it really was just a fun class. Almost everyone that I talked to enjoyed it a lot, and so did I. Here's to a great year.