Learn | Make | Fix | Run

My portfolio is complete, and my LinkedIn profile has been updated to showcase my background in instructional design. I invite my blog readers and Instagram followers to take a sneak peek before I announce I am open to work on LinkedIn. Catholic school administrators are unsung heroes.  Quite often, they need to do the work of an entire district office. Not only are they responsible for ensuring students are learning. They are responsible for promoting the school’s Catholic identity, hiring teachers and staff, onboarding new employees, approving payroll, custodial work (when something needs to be cleaned up or repaired and no one else can help), fundraising, budget creation and monitoring, approving expenses, reporting to stakeholders, capital improvement projects, marketing, retention, staff evaluations, and the list goes on. The number of employees reporting directly to a Catholic elementary school principal is staggering. Throw in a pandemic that shut down all schools and forced...

Google Sites and I have spent a lot of time together this past week. I have decided to use Google Sites to host my portfolio. It’s been a week of amazement and frustration. What you can do these days without knowing how to code websites is impressive. Conversely, it’s so frustrating when you want to do something, and you don’t have access to the HTML or CSS. I learned how to make a website in 1996. I used Pico and coded line by line. No syntax coloring, no auto-close for tags, no responsive layouts, and no 12 or 16-column grids. In the late 90’s, I was using Microsoft FrontPage just as it was becoming mainstream. I also remember using Dreamweaver during that time as well. In the late 2000’s, I learned PHP and MySQL for creating web pages in Dreamweaver. I got my partner teachers on the web with WordPress classroom websites and eventually Google Sites. They were using TeacherWeb. I am used to more control when creating websites. However, I know the tradeoff for control is convenience. U...

This week, I spent time putting the finishing touches on my Articulate Rise 360 Food Scrap Recycling project and my Articulate 360 Storyline Marathon Heart Rate Training project. My 30-day trial is scheduled to end today, and I wanted to make sure all of the assets I needed were downloaded and functional before I’m cut off. The lead image for this post was borne from feedback on my flagship project. There is an option for the user to ask the coach for advice in many of the scenarios. However, with a busy background, the phone on the left became hard to find. This is just one example of my work this week. As I put on the finishing touches, I asked, “This or that?” This week, I learned how to use Google Cloud. Apparently, I have a bucket, and in the bucket, I have my portfolio files. I feel like a professional web developer when the files that I have stored start with https://storage.googleapis.com/  I continue to write descriptions about my two portfolio projects and am very excited...