508 Compliance Reflection

What is your reaction to the entire web development process? Please describe any positive and negative reactions.
What was involved in the process of developing your site? What obstacles did you encounter? How did you overcome those obstacles? What successes did you encounter?
Will you continue to build on/update this site after this course ends? Why/Why not? Please explain.
What errors/issues did you find when you tested your web site for 508 compliance? Based on those errors/issues, what changes would you make to your site?

My Website

To be honest, I really enjoyed the process of creating a website. I can definitely see myself creating a one for my future classroom and referring to it on a regular basis. I believe that use of technology can only help students and parents achieve excellence. In my opinion, all aspects of the website creation were positive. It was so thrilling to be able to post a youtube video of the city I lived in a few years ago in order to share it with my "students." It is also vital for parents to be able to contact the teacher in a quick and easy manner. I believe that the contact portion of my website will create and maintain a corporative relationship between both the parent and the teacher. The only thing that I could think of being negative is the fact that I may forgot to add labels of my pictures for those students who cannot see the pictures on their home computers. However, this will become something that will be engrained in my mind over time.

In creating this website, I had to think about what I could provide for my students in order to enhance their educational process within the classroom and outside of the classroom. I had to pick and choose what aspects were important to me. I thought about how important having a homework page is. Students are constantly saying I forgot my homework assignment book at school so I couldn't remember what the assignment was. If I were to provide a homework page, then students would have something to refer to at home. This is also a way of going green! If all teachers had something like this, then there would not be a need for paper agenda books! I honestly think my biggest obstacle was remembering my password in order to edit my website. I think that the weebly site has provided a friendly and creative atmosphere for all users. For being a first time user, I think the information was accessible and easy to understand. I just had some issues with moving my sub tabs or subtitles into the order that I wanted them. In order to overcome his obstacle, I just had to play around with it myself before getting a hang of it. It was nice to have other people completing the same task so that I could refer to them. My greatest success was putting the youtube video onto my page. I usually have trouble with incorporating links and hyperlinks however, this was a quick and smooth process!

I would most certainly continue to build onto this website after the program. I think my answers to the questions above really show how much I value this resource and how much it can help every single person in the learning process! I would even encourage other teachers within the building to try out this system and see how it works with their students. I think that it would be great to have all the teachers websites linked the to school website.

[508 (C)] [WCAG 2.1 (1)] The use of color must not be a single method for indicating important information on a web page. This was one of the errors that stuck out to me when I tested my site for 508 compliance. I'm not sure what exactly this means but if I could take a stab at it, I would have to guess that it is telling me that my colors may not be visible to all people accessing my site. When I think about this, I think about those people who are colorblind. I chose to use a light brown color and when I think about it my stepfather is color blind and when he made a replica birdhouse of our tan house, it came out a different color. I would have to say that I would definitely need to look more into colors that can be seen by everyone and use more of them. I would also have to check to see what color fonts I could use with certain backgrounds. Background colors can have a use affect on the font color and what a person could see.