Reflection on Instructional Website

I just submitted my instructional website a little bit ago. I think that's the biggest website I've ever made so far. *laughs*

For my website, I decided to create tutorials for microsoft office and podcasts. I figured this is something students and staff could benefit from, especially as the versions get updated. I made tutorials for the 2000 versions, and I plan to create 2007 versions for it in the future. The site will offer different versions, which will meet different people's needs (not everyone might have the same version). For the podcast tutorial, I did a simple one on Audacity (this one would need updated though, because I didn't cover everything in Audacity, just the basics on how to make a recording). Students can have access to the site even after they graduate from high school (so it would be open to the public). This way they can use it when they're in college and beyond.

Creating tutorials is a much more time-consuming task than what I thought it would be. For my tutorials, I pretty much wrote out the steps with occassional supporting images. I'm not happy with how the images turned out though. This is the first time I learned how to capture the image of what's currently on your screen, but the images are too small and it's hard to read what's on them. There's got to be a better way to take clearer screenshots.

I think it would be nice to create tutorial vodcasts too. Some things are easier to learn if you can see it "in action". This way patrons would have an option if they want written tutorials (which they can print off to take with them), or more visual tutorials. Vodcasts would've been more helpful in some areas of the tutorials because some things are hard to explain in words.

Overall, I found this to be an educational experience. I actually learned more about Microsoft Office than what I knew, since I was forced to break them down to write the tutorials. :)

I learned a lot from this class and everyone else. I wish good luck to everyone and hope you all have a nice summer (and congrats to those who are graduating!). Take care.