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Comparing Website Building Platforms

 For the final two projects of the ETEC 5213 course, we designed two websites using two different platforms. I chose Wix and Weebly. The two platforms are very similar in that both are free services (with paid subscriptions available) and has similar functions. Wix is unique that it offers an Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) which designs very visually appealing websites with little effort from the website creator. Much of the layout has been done for you, and you as the creator simply needs to customize specific elements such as pictures and texts. Weebly, on the other hand, is much more hands-on, requiring more effort to design but offers greater degrees with flexibility in terms of layout.  Ironically, as easy as it is to use Wix's ADI to design my website, I encountered the most amount of difficulties with this mode of editing. Because much of the layout design has already been done for you, you as the creator has little to no creative space. A lot of elements (color s...
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Educational Screencast

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For more information, please visit the following sites: Speedy Entry from the Finale User Manual Finale Tutorial: Speedy Entry Without MIDI (Video)
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Educational Podcast

For more information, please visit the following sites: YouTube in the Classroom: 7 Tips and Best Practices Harnessing the Power of YouTube in the Classroom
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Photo Editing

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     This week we have switched to the topic of photo editing. While I have played around with some other photo editing softwares, I was completely new to Adobe Lightroom. It took some exploring and learning from online tutorials to understand what I was doing, but in the end, I'm very happy with the turnout of my edited photo.      For my photo,  I chose the photo of a bowl of ramen I took in a restaurant last year. While the ramen was absolutely delicious, I feel that the photo did not do it justice. My goal was to make this bowl of ramen look as appetizing as it tasted. The first photo is the original, unedited photo, and the next one is the edited version.     Most of the changes made to the photo was made by adjusting the lighting and color. For lighting, I slightly increased the exposure and made bigger increases in contrast, highlights, and whites to make the photo appear brighter. I decreased the shadow to make the darker colors ...
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Using an External CSS

 This week's project is the most complex thus far. We were tasked with building a web resume that includes our picture and describing our education and work experiences. For this project, we are using HTML with an external CSS, that is, we are constructing two documents, one containing the texts for the web page (the HTML) and one containing instructions on how the web page should look (the CSS). Because styling a website can often involve a ton of code (as I have discovered this week), having the CSS in a separate file can reduce a lot of clutter in the main HTML code. Building the HTML file is the easy part. By this point, I am confident enough with using HTML tags that I can plug in my information from my resume fairly quickly. The challenging part, though, is the external CSS file. I had to try a lot of different things to get the web page to look the way I want. For example, I wanted the paragraphs beneath each entry in the Education and Experience section to be indented. Howe...
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CSS and the Box Model

The next HTML project involved creating an invitation for an event utilizing Cascading Style Sheet, or CSS, and the Box Model. The Box Model is type of design that wraps HTML elements within a box, and it includes a margin, a border, a padding, and the HTML element. This model is ideal for invitations, because many of the existing invitation designs on paper already have the elements of margin, border, and padding. Part of the requirements for the project also included the use of bold or italic texts, utilizing different colored texts, and a hyperlink to an email (similar to the one used in the previous HTML project). When it comes to choosing an event, I immediately thought of weddings, as I was just planning a wedding for this past summer. Even though the spread of COVID-19 obstructed those plans, my husband and I were still able to get married in a small, private ceremony. I thought it might be fun to create an invitation as if our wedding were the large gathering of family and frie...
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Coding with HTML

These past two weeks in ETEC 5213, we began a unit in HTML coding. I had no prior experience with HTML coding, so I was very eager to learn new things.  The task for this week was to build a website to introduce ourselves using basic HTML coding that included heading, paragraph text, imbedded image, links to a website and email, and a change in font or background color. Since I use a MacBook, I used Text Edit to write my code. Overall, I found the procedure to be fairly easy. The tutorials were very well-structured and easy to follow, and the code itself follows very structured and logical steps.  I encountered a few minor challenges while completing this project. One disadvantage with writing code in Text Edit is that you are not able to preview the website as you code to make sure that your code works the way it was intended. I found an easy solution by coding with the Tryit Editor on w3schools.com first before transferring my code to Text Edit. The Tryit Editor allows you t...
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