Still working at it...

Not being able to study when I went away last week has made things difficult.  I began to catch up with things at the weekend and am still working at it.  I looked at the ICOT task first as I consider this to be the more challenging task.  I decided to do this as a magazine article on how online community can support learning.  I have now finished my first draft and am trying to figure out how to put it all together!  I am looking at templates on the Internet and trying to sort something out...
In the meantime I have also prepared a first draft of my work relationships essay but am having a bit of trouble getting my organisation chart up to decent standard (I am a bit of a novice with PowerPoint).  I hope to be in a position to submit both pieces of work soon.

Back in town...

I have been away for the past few days and just catching up with things.  I had hoped to be able to get some of this done whilst I was away but unfortunately it wasn't possible.

I'm preparing my first draft of Work Relationships essay right now and will shortly tackle the Online Community essay.  Further update will be posted soon...

Coping... but only just

For various reasons, I wasn't able to do much study in the early part of the week.  So I spent the best of part of the last two days writing up my essays.  I finished work late on Thursday evening, spent some time playing with my kids until they went to bed at around 8pm and then got down to work.  I kept writing till well past 1am before falling asleep of exhaustion.  I then got up at 7am to get ready for work!

I found it hard doing my essay on Tools for Online Learning.  I have used quite a range of tools over the years including Facebook, Twitter, Discussion boards etc.  Since starting my course, I have tried new tools such as Posterous, Google +, and Blogger.

I read the relevant material and considered what tools I wanted to write about.  I had always intended to use Facebook and Google+ in my essay but was a bit put off by the fact that many other students had already used them in their work.  After much deliberation, I decided that I would go ahead anyway.  So what if others have beaten me to it, I will be writing my own thoughts and doing work that is my own so it shouldn't be an issue.

I started by planning what I wanted to write.  I decided to structure the essay so that it sort of tells an evolutionary story of social network sites and my experience of using them.  I planned to include an introduction to give context, then look at individual sites (Myspace as well as FB and G+) and end with conclusion and references.  It was a hard slog but I finally finished and posted it in the VLE.  I have done it but not sure if it's any good!  Mainly due to time constraints I only used plain text whilst other students used images and charts in their work.  I wonder if this count against me...

With the ICOT task out of the way, I needed to urgently finish my Working Life essay.  In my previous post, I spoke of getting the photos done but never got round to finishing my essay.  But I got my head down and got this done as soon as I could and uploaded to Shared Document area in IWS section.  My essay had not been completed when the tutor looked at the work of other students.  But I am hoping that she will maybe still take a quick look :)

I had originally planned to make a video for my Working Life task, something along the lines of Collecting Stories by Jonathan Harris.  I've not made a video before and so needed some time to look into this.  Hopefully this is something I will do for a future piece of work..

I had spent time today catching up post on Posterous and discussion threads in VLE.  I have also done a peer review for a fellow students essay on Work Relationships.  I now need to start thinking about my essay on this and how online communities can support learning.

My photo story

It's generally busy at work on most days, but the last week of the month is always particularly busy.  This is the time to tie up all loose ends and ensure everything is in place before my schools convert to Academy.  It can be quite a stressful time.

I didn't get round to taking photos for my IWS task during the week.  So I went into the office today as I am not in until Tuesday.  It's a beautiful day today, the sun is shining and friends were off to the beach while I headed off to work.  Oh well, it had to be done!

After taking my pics I downloaded them onto my computer and and then tried to add text to the image using Photoshop software.  I've not had much experience of editing images in any way so I was struggling a bit.  I managed to work out how to do it using the text tool but I couldn't make the font bigger.  I played around with it a bit before I was able to do this.  However, in the end I decided that I would just add text seperately rather than the image.

I then pondered about how to link the photos together.  I considered copying the images to MS Word and compress the pictures.  I ultimately decided to use PowerPoint (hope this is an acceptable format) and used the Shrink Pictures website to make the file size of the pictures smaller.  I'm uploaded it to the shared documents section in the VLE.  I just need to write my 500 word assignment on this.

I'm going to try to get as much done as I can in the next few hours before I head out to see Milton Jones, the comedian, in Wimbledon.  I had booked tickets for this some time ago.  It should be good fun, but then it's back to study when I get back.