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. 

Capstone Summer Work

This summer I focused on reaching milestone 1 for my project which was
"the project will be a functioning WordPress site on my localhost. LearnDash will be installed along with all of the plugins needed for LearnDash. I will also have learned the layout of LearnDash and add courses, lessons, videos, etc."  To start on milestone 1, researched a few different learning management systems to house the curriculum I'll be writing.  After researching different learning management systems I decided to focus most of my attention on learning the LMS LearnDash. I started learning about how to create courses and upload them to WordPress. I've been working on this on my localhost. I don't have anything online yet.
One of my other learning goals was to learn SEO so I could get the curriculum noticed by search engines and teachers would be able to find it. I actually have learned a lot about SEO, through Lynda.com course, podcasts and blogs from experts. After speaking with Jen and Ed last night though about changes I'll probably be making in my goals for the capstone, I'm not sure if any of this will actually be helpful in my project.
Looking at my work plan and milestones for my project I've almost completed all of Task 1 this summer. I just need to create the home, about, and blog pages for the curriculum on my WordPress site.

Capstone Milestones and Timeline

Milestone 1	WordPress Site Setup with LearnDash
	At this milestone, the project will be a functioning WordPress site on my localhost. LearnDash will be installed along with all of the plugins needed for LearnDash. I will also have learned the layout of LearnDash and add courses, lessons, videos, etc.
Milestone 2	20 Days of Curriculum Laid Out with Specific Learning Goals and Sample Website Built
	For the proposal, I have laid out what topic will be taught each week. At this milestone, it will be broken down even further to what specific skill will be taught each day. This will be laid out in a Google Doc. The purpose of this step is to work through what each day of the curriculum will look like. I’ll be creating a sample website (student final project) so as to create the curriculum using a backward design approach.
Milestone 3	Days 1-5 of Curriculum Curated and Built Out on WordPress site
	When this milestone is met the project will continue to be working on my localhost with curriculum on the site. The project will have 5 days of completed curriculum including activities, videos, worksheets, classroom printables, badging, and any quizzes. These activities will focus on the HTML skeleton and file management.
Milestone 4	Days 6-10 of Curriculum Curated and Built Out on WordPress site
	When this milestone is met the project will continue to be working on my localhost with curriculum on the site. The project will have 10 days of completed curriculum including activities, videos, worksheets, classroom printables, badging, and any quizzes. During these lessons, the instruction will focus on basic HTML tags and the students will start adding tags to their webpage.
Milestone 5	Days 11-15 of Curriculum Curated and Built Out on WordPress site
	When this milestone is met the project will continue to be working on my localhost with curriculum on the site. The project will have 15 days of completed curriculum including activities, videos, worksheets, classroom printables, badging, and any quizzes. These activities will focus on the basics of CSS.
Milestone 6	Days 16-20 of Curriculum Curated and Built Out on WordPress site
	When this milestone is met the project will continue to be working on my localhost with curriculum on the site. The project will have 20 days of completed curriculum including activities, videos, worksheets, classroom printables, badging, and any quizzes. With the completion of this milestone, all of the curricula will be written.
Milestone 7	WooCommerce Setup with Courses
	At the completion of this milestone, all of the courses will be on the site and the site will be running on my localhost. There will be a sample course for free and the full course will be for sale on the site.
Milestone 8	Non-Curriculum Pages Built and Content Added with SEO
	When this milestone is finished all of the pages on the website will work. These pages will include a home page, about the project page, curriculum page, and a blog. At least one blog post will be added at this point. The use of the Yoast plugin will be added here along with SEO strategies.
Milestone 9	Custom Theme Built
	At this point, the site will be nearly complete. All of the plugins will be working, the curriculum will be on the site, and now the custom theme will be complete. The site will have a nice layout that has a custom logo and branding.
Milestone 10	Website Live Online
	With the completion of this milestone, the site will be live online and be working properly.