Reflection for MC Website Project

Name: Carly

Date: March 12, 2008

PURPOSE:
In this project, we were supposed to learn about moral courage (intertwined with whatever subject you chose), how to make a website look legit, learn about our topic, and practice plagiarism. In order to learn about all this, we had to create a website about a subject of your group's choosing (out of a big list of topics), and elaborate on all of its factors and things that had to do with that certain subject (our group decided to do AIDS). We were assigned a group of 5 or 6 students, then we each typed up 5 pages of notes about our subject. After we finished our notes, we made site maps which are a big map of what we're going to put on our site. We finished ours pretty early, so we started on the outline of the website. We decided to do a black, red, white, and grey color scheme. We had a table as the outline in read, then all of our information inside the table. You had to have some media, non-plagiarized information, an appealing look, and working links on your website. It might not sound like much, but it really was a lot of work to do. Our group had 10 pages, and a lot of our stuff took a long time to do. Towards the end of the project, our pages started going blank, and we had to do 4 or 5 of them over again, so, clearly, it was a very frustrating project.

WHAT I LEARNED:

In this project, I learned a TON about AIDS and HIV. The first half of the time we had on this project was mainly focused on getting the right, non-plagiarized, non-copyrighted information and pictures ready for the site. That's when I learned all the information about AIDS and HIV. AIDS stands for Acquired Immuno- Deficiency Syndrome, and HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus. That is a disease that weakens your immune system. That allows a cold or the flu to stay in your body and take over because your immune system isn't strong enough to fight back. HIV is the early part of the disease. HIV isn't really that bad, but if it evolves into AIDS, then it can be deadly. HIV and AIDS are STDs which are Sexually Transmitted Diseases. An STD can only be spread if someone has unprotected sex, uses a needle that has been used by an HIV infected person, or being the baby of a mother who is HIV positive.

Also in this project, I learned about how to do a lot of things on Dreamweaver and how to make a website. I learned about the format of a site and that you have to have things hooked into each other (in certain folders) in order for it to show up properly on a website. I learned that you have to save, save, save, and save again!!! You also want to save it in several different places, like on a flash drive, send it to yourself over email, and in your Documents. We had a little trouble with that at first because we lost a page and we had to re-do it.

REFLECTION:

I didn't really LOVE this project because I really didn't know all that much about Dreamweaver, so I couldn't do a lot of stuff that I needed or wanted to. I think I did a really good job in this project. I did TONS of work and extra hours to get the site done. When everyone else came in for 2 hours each week, I came in for 4 or 5 hours in the morning to get more work done. I think that some of the people in our group didn't really pull too much of their weight, so someone else in my group and I had to do most of the work. Next time, I think I would spend more of my time checking all the links and the pages so that they weren't gone, or not working. We kept having that happen to us and it started to get really frustrating and annoying that we had to do work 2 or even 3 times because some people were careless and didn't save their work. But, all in all, I think our website was pretty good, and I am almost comepletely satisfied.

ARTIFACTS:

I will link my website to my DP so that everyojne can see and read all about AIDS and HIV. :)