Website Extravaganza

Hi everyone! I hope your Spring Break was filled with some much needed R&R. Although I spent majority of my time catching up with friends and family, I spent a fair amount of time working on class assignments.

My teammate Ashley and I went to campus on Wednesday to meet with Judy Ohl from the BU IT department. Our meeting with Judy lasted about 40min and we learned a lot about what the next steps of our project should be. Although Judy praised out WIX site, she understood our need to make it more accessible to the public and more professional looking. Judy suggested moving the content to the free University server that runs using Druple. Unfortunately, if we chose this route we will lose a lot of the functionality that we have on WIX as well as a lot of the visually appealing elements that our current site has. If we went to the free server our site would look quite generic. Our group looked into how much it would cost to buy our domain through WIX and continue to update our site using WIX tools. The best plan offered would cost $14  for the first few months but then it would become $24 each month for the rest of its use. That would be $288 a year. Our group feels uncomfortable about owing that much money each year. Although we could write proposals to the English department and/or the University foundation to ask them to help fund our site, we don’t want to push something onto our clients that would be unnecessary. This is why we inquired about the University servers and other more affordable options. Ashley and I discussed the possibility of purchasing our own domain outside of WIX entirely, but we’d still get to keep our site’s unique designs and functionality. Ashley believes this this could cost as little as $13 a year. This option seems like the best one yet, however, it is almost too good to be true, but we’ll have to look at it more thoroughly as a group. With Judy there was also dicsussion about getting a page for HuskiesHelpingHuskies up on HuskySync. Judy thought maybe that would be the best option for us, but I believe we need more than just a measly page for how extensive our site is now. Nonetheless, I do think HuskySync would be a great way to get HuskiesHelpingHuskies additional attention.

We have exactly 42 days until we present our finalized projects to our clients. As time ticks away I’m becoming anxious that we won’t have anything grand to show for our time spent on this project. There has been a few rough patches in the beginning of our project and we lost a lot of time waiting for client meetings to take place. So from here until April 30th it is officially crunch time for our group to finish everything that we need to in order to succeed. My teammates and I have put a lot of thought and effort into our project, we just need to find a way to show it.

Aside from group work, I’ve been reading quite a few sources for our second individual papers. I need to accumulate more knowledge on Multi-modal learning and the best way to do that is to research the topic. Most of my articles pertain to multi-modal learning in educational environments. Reading these articles are making me feel like an education major all over again. The studies are interesting but some of them are related to things I’ve already learned during my time as an education major. I don’t know if the articles I found aren’t going as much in depth as they should but so far they seem to be stating the obvious.  Hoping to finish the paper sooner rather than later but at this point in the semester I feel as though my procrastination is at an all time high.

-Anna J.