Final Reflection

Overall I am happy with my project. Before starting my project I had never used or really even knew what a learning management system was. I had used Canvas and Blackboard as a student but never considered using one as a teacher before. I really enjoyed learning about different learning management systems and diving into Teachable and Canvas and discovering their capabilities. Beyond the LMS, I really like how my WordPress site turned out. It has a fully functioning shopping cart and it's mobile friendly. Creating the media queries drove me crazy though! I learned that waiting for my cache to clear, even after forcing it to clear, was enough to make me want to scream. Maybe there's something about the cache clearing that I don't know and need to learn.
My biggest challenge with the project wasn't anything to do with the project at all. I knew I could learn whatever I needed to learn to complete my project, but it was my family life that was hard. Right before starting the semester we moved from the West to the South. Not only was this a culture change, but we moved away from family yet again. However, this time was the first time being away with a baby. My husband started medical residency and has worked extremely long hours. Finding time to work without a child has been hard, especially for anything live such as the advising sessions.
The biggest takeaway from my project is very interesting to me. It was during my last advising session with Jen. I can't remember exactly what she said, but it was something along the lines of I have a talent for design and/or instructional design. This comment was what helped me decide what I want to do with this degree. Due to my husband's job, I want to work at home so I can be home with my kids. I was going to start a web design company, but this comment made me realize I should niche my business to online course creators and help them get their course online and help design the course and the site. This collides my education background with my new degree and I love it! I put what I was doing on social media and I've had a lot of people interested in becoming a client. This is a strange takeaway from the project, but also it's changed the course of what I thought I was going to do and it fits me much better. Jen, if you're reading this, thank you for your comments and your wisdom. You've helped guide me in more ways than just my capstone project.
As for the project, I really am excited about the curriculum and want to finish this first unit before graduation in May. I need to step away from it for a few weeks though...I really am so sick of looking at it LOL. I'll pick it up in the new year and finish it out. Hopefully, by the time the capstone fair rolls around I can have it finished and have it being taught in a few classrooms.

Another Update

Week 1 is complete! I've been working on building the course on Teachable and Canvas. You can see the Teachable course here. I don't like how the only thing each lesson has is a PowerPoint download. I'm working on different ways to present then course that would be more conducive to a site like Teachable. I'm also working on using my own domain instead of .teachable.com. I've got a subdomain setup, but I haven't been able to link it correctly to my teachable school.
As for Canvas, I've got the modules and lessons laid out. I've got to upload the files now. Again, I'd like to make them more interactive.
As far as my WordPress website goes, I'm in the middle of creating a child theme for the Genesis framework. It's coming along, but the design needs a lot of work at this point. It's currently only on my localhost. 

Week 6 Update

This week has gone pretty well. I've wrapped up week 1 of the curriculum. There are a few final touches I'll be adding, but I'm feeling good about the progress and feel that it's coming together well. I am a bit nervous about time. I'm going to really have to speed up creating week 2. I've really taken a lot of time on week 1 though because I want the curriculum to be done well and something that teachers will really use. However, I also want enough time to create my website and make it good. So, my struggle right now is knowing how much time to prepare for creating the website. I'm going to make a new timeline with the new goals that Jen and I discussed in our first meeting to help with time management.

Week 5 Update

Week 1 of the curriculum is in the final stages of being complete. This has taken me a lot longer than I realized it would. I really want the curriculum to be fun and engaging for the students and easy to facilitate for teachers, therefore it's taken a lot of thought on activities and lesson set up. I will be finished with Week 1 this week and contacting teachers to see if they'll test out the week with their classes and give me feedback. I'll also be starting week 2 this week and work some on the website. It's going slow, but I feel like I'll be able to complete the project in time.

Week 4 Update

This week I've focused a lot on building the WP theme for my project. I've made it through a lot of the course on Lynda.com, but I'm still not through it yet.
I've also been working on the first week of curriculum still. This has been slow going because I keep changing things up and questioning myself on what would be fun for students, but still teaching the code in a relevant way. It's getting there though. I'm making it a goal to have the first week done this week so I can get some user testing done on it.
I also built a very basic website to show what students will be learning in the course. I build it on CodePen.io so students can see an exact replica of the project.

Week 3 Update

This week I worked on the first week of the curriculum. It's coming together, but still not done. I decided to step away from it for the last half of the week since I was starting to lose the creativity it takes to come up with activities and lesson ideas. For the second half of the week, I started working on creating a custom theme for my website. I started on the Lynda.com course-WordPress: Building Themes from Scratch Using Underscores . I spent most of my time getting gulp, npm, and node.js running on my computer. When I finally had it all set up with browser sync working, my sass wasn't compiling. So, I feel like most of my time this week I've wasted trying to get that to work. After spending SO. MANY. HOURS. on trying to get it up and running, I remembered using a compiler in Jen's DGMD E-27.  So, I'm going to try to use the Scout compiler we used in that class. Hopefully, this week will be MUCH more productive than this last week.

Week 2 Update

Things are going a lot slower than I had originally planned. Coming into this semester, I already had 2 days of curriculum done and up to day 10 outlined with teaching objectives and possible activities. I decided to change how the course was going to work for the students and not have them use Sublime Text but use CodePen.io instead. Well, because of this I've had to completely redo day 1 and I scrapped day 2 all together.  I started a new day 2 and realized there were things that would need to be taught in the curriculum before the day 2 I was creating. Now I've got day 1 complete and most of what will be day 3 complete.

I started to created screencast videos with me speaking, which I wasn't initially planning on using. These videos are taking a long time. I've had to re-record most of them a few times. It's coming along though and I think the integration of these videos will make the curriculum much more user-friendly. 

I'd really like to get the first week of curriculum complete with printable activities, pictures, and the lesson plans by next week. After working this week, this seems quite overwhelming. However, I want to get it done so I can send it out to a few teachers to try in their classrooms and I can get feedback and adjust.