Mel's Exploring Your Digital Portfolio Blog

 My Smackdown:               I chose two websites representing schools of art, to compare how their features and choices make differences for the viewer's experience. Tyler School of Art & Architecture is my example of a good website, using consistent legible fonts, clear color choices, and interesting graphics and titles. It was also very easy to navigate with clear categories and a search function. In comparison, the Yale website is designed by various people, allowing for students to edit. This can create a more jarring design, being less aesthetically pleasing to many. There were several fonts, many colors, and large boxes of text that were more difficult to read. It was fairly easy to navigate, but there was no advertising pull to look further into the website, which I did find on Tyler's website.           Overall, I would say what makes a good website can be very opinion based, but from a pure software perspecti...

            Chapter three of the Connected Educator focuses on the process of learning, and what that looks like. A theory from Cochran-Smith and Lytle about knowledge is described in the chapter, on how there is knowledge for, in and of practice. Knowledge for practice is when reputable information is shared from educators to others, so that we can properly teach others. Knowledge in practice describes the stage of experimentation that comes with developing knowledge, where trying different things helps you learn more along the way. Finally, knowledge of practice describes how educators can learn with each other to develop new ideas and processes for effective education, in and out of the classroom. The Connected Educator has a constant focus on in the classroom versus out of the classroom approaches to learning, and how both are necessary and useful.            The process of ...