Kate's Take

  Was it really that bad?     I considered a lot of titles for this post... “It’s the end of the world as we know it.” “A Means to an End” “The Ending is Just the Beginning.” “But did you die?” But really my biggest take away is to eat the frog... As I worked on the paper prototype, I KNEW I was in over my head and was committing to things that I wasn’t going to easily be able to deliver in HTML and/or CSS, but I stuck with the “what’s best for the design” theory and continued to push.   My testing with people around me went well, and I had a solid design, but really was still VERY unsure of how to get from point A (knowing what I wanted) to point B (getting it done!). All in all, I learned a ton about my tenacity – when to sacrifice my plan a bit to make it work.   I was most concerned about the fillable fields – and I was able to find a insert tab that made Dreamweaver MUCH more user friendly, making me question how I missed it the first 6 weeks and ...

  Taking the HARD road?   What a week... CSS continues to plague me – I think I’ve got it, it looks right, and then it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. As others have said, I now know what I’m not cut out for, but I do have an increased level of respect for those who do. Honestly, I’m terrified of next week. I know what I want it to do, I know how I want it to look, but I honestly have NO IDEA how to get it from point A to point B and that seems like a very big hill to climb.   Challenge with my project... I’m really hung up on one major challenge right now. I originally wanted my module to be linear – do step one, then two, then three and you have tools to be the greatest customer service agent there ever was. Well, now I’m questioning whether I want to allow my learner to jump around – to identify what part they REALLY want and just head there without moving through the other parts.   Pros to making it linear is that I KNOW I"ll have better outcomes w...

  To CSS or Not to CSS...   I wish it were the question, but it’s not. Have you ever had something that you REALLY didn’t want to do? Eat the frog and all of that? Well, CSS has topped my list after hours of struggling and googling, and YouTubing and LInked In Learning... Progress, however small, is still progress. Last week at this point, all I wanted to do was to turn my page blue. My son hears me talking to myself and asking me why I’m so insistent that the computer be blue. Luckily, he missed the *colorful* comments moments before.   As I struggle with CSS, my love for learning is also renewed. Having been out of the classroom as a teacher for a long time, and having kids that are a bit older and not in the stages of daily discovery as when they were toddlers, I forgot how much fun it is to learn. Even in my frustration and desire to throw my laptop, the HUGE amount of success I feel when one tiny thing goes my way reminds me WHY adults choose to continue...