My Introduction to ICT4Education

My First Website:

 

Development of my e-Portfolio Website

 

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are the technologies used in the conveying, manipulation and storage of data by electronic means (The Open University, n.d.)

 

As I mentioned in my first ever blog, one of the biggest things I had to settle in my mind for this course was my concept of what constituted ICT. As I have progressed, I have a much greater appreciation for the concept of convergence and how it relates to ICT. I no longer see ICT as just computers, but complete solutions that make use of various technologies and tools.

 

Doing this assignment forced me to come out of my comfort zone and confront something that I thought was way above what I could do - design a website. In fact, I was dreading this assignment from the time I read what was involved. My first hurdle was selecting the tool to develop the website. I chose Wix.com because of their television commercials. The sign-up process for the free Wix account was very straight-forward.

 

The second phase of my website development was to determine the design of the website. The content that I needed was already generated as part of the course, so it was just a simple matter of cutting and pasting or uploading documents. Designing the website was made simple because of the many templates that Wix provided, but I still had to figure out what the different elements did and how they could be applied e.g Blog elements and tags for searching. I chose to use the Blog elements for my discussions and normal text boxes with links for my assignments. I was able to add anchors for different page elements and links to documents and external websites. I have learnt a great deal through this experience and am no longer intimidated by website development, at least simple websites. I have proved to myself that I can create a simple website and I can definitely see a greater use for these newly acquired skills to assist in my chosen field of Early Childhood Education.

 

 

 

References

The Open University. (n.d. ). What are ICTs? Retrieved from    http://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/computing-and-ict/information-and-communication-technologies/icts-everyday-life/content-section-1.2