Instructional Website

My area of expertise is nursing.  Within the very broad field of nursing, my expertise is management in nursing and nursing care of the elderly.  In reading the guidelines for this project it said informational or tutorial website.  I obviously made a mistake in the choice of topics for this assignment (as evidenced by my grade).  I chose to write about quality in nursing and risk management since this is something that I do regularly  on my job.  I used a text book used at the UofA nursing school for my main resource and added links for more information on each topic (just didn't do it right).   

This is a screen capture for the opening page of my website for Nursing Management and Quality Improvement.

I did encounter some obstacles.  My first obstacle is personal, but yet the biggest problem that I had.  That would be the time involved in trying to learn all of this material well enough to be able to apply it.  I feel like I spend more time going back and trying to revisit areas that I need to know and was unable to retain by using the tutorials OR the tutorial seems so simple but yet when I try it, it does not work.  I also had problems with the fact that some of the information we were given was in a different version of the software which makes it hard as well because the steps to take are not the same in every version.  Another obstacle would be that the real quality time that I have to work on these projects is the weekend and by then it is too late to try to contact anyone for help  and I am on my own.  The last obstacle was in actually publishing it to the Internet.  I watched the tutorials but it never seemed to give all of the steps and I just had to fumble through it until I figured it out and I'm not sure that I could do it again.  The program that seemed easy and fun to start with is now something that I am not sure that I ever want to use again being that it is the reason I will no longer have a 4.0 in graduate school.  I am devastated and have no one to blame but myself, however I now am finding myself not wanting to ever have anything to do with website development. 

What I have learned is that I will need a face-to-face course on anything like this in the future, that this Internet, learn on your own, type of learning is not for me with subject matter like this.  Maybe it could be if the information that we need was all in one place instead of what felt like a hundred.  Even with the mistakes that I made I do feel like I at least know the basics and could still make a website with a little help in the future. 

I know there must be at least a thousand features that I still know nothing about.  As said before above, I am having a hard time ever wanting to learn them.  It is probably still too early to ask that question while I am still grieving over my performance on the project destroying my perfect grade point average.  So at this time there is nothing that I am wanting to learn about it that I don't know.   

Fun with Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is an amazing program that helps you to develop websites and pages.  This program is just that, amazing.  I had no idea how sites were made prior to this course and now I am just so impressed with all that goes into it and how easy it can be.  Now I say easy very loosely.  I have now used dreamweaver twice.  The first time I was writing the code myself and not paying attention to the prompts or any of the pop up boxes.  This time, knowing more, I was able to use the help that the program provides and it wrote most of it for me.  It was too cool.  I was able to make two pages and add links to other sites, to my other site, and to my email.  It really can be fun.  I would say that my only obstacle was that this assignment was not right after learning html, and css.  I had to spend some time refreshing and could not believe how much it seemed like I forgot in that short time.  Thankfully the tutorials are broken up like they are so that I could go straight to what I needed for refreshment. 

I have really learned a lot and now just want to keep going.  I am so impressed with how much this program does for you, its so smart.  I enjoy being able to build the site as the code is written for me while at the same time now being able to write most of the code myself with the knowledge that I have obtained.  Its funny, I keep thinking of watching the facebook movie and having no idea what they meant when they were talking about when they said, "coding".  I may have to watch it again.  ;-)

Being that I want to teach online in the future, i know that this program may be a huge asset for me and if I could get proficient enough at it, it would also be an amazing addition to my resume.  I feel like online learning is the future and am so excited to be able to jump right in and get started.