Wednesday, February 1, 2012

  1. Office Suite
      I think we spent too much time on Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The only useful things about these programs are the basic functions of them, and we went very in depth into the less important things they do, and most of us will never use these again
  2. HTML/CSS
      I thought this part of class was fun. We should have spent more time on it because it is probably the most useful unit we've done this semester and it also seems to be the one we ignored the most. There are thousands of uses for HTML that we could have learned
  3. Google Blogging Tools
      Although the concept of this was a good idea, the interface of blogger is absolutely terrible. There are other blogging sites, like tumblr, which are much easier to use and also much more popular. Since they're more popular it also makes more sense to learn to use a tool that has more outreach and possibilites.
  4. Google Web Tools
      This unit was really well done, the interface of the site was hard to use but that's not something you can fix so

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Pushing Back School

Our Main Focus

We believe that it would be more beneficial for students and teachers alike if 5 minutes were subtracted from each period, pushing the start of the day back a total of 45 minutes.

It is estimated that adolescents need approximately 9 hours of sleep every night. If school begins at 7:30, and students naturally need to wake up, eat breakfast and go through a morning routine, we can assume that they need to wake up at roughly 6:30, often earlier. This means that students would need to go to sleep not much later than 9 pm. An article by CNN Health suggests that adolescents do not feel tired until 10 PM or after. This makes the functionality of our current schedule extremely unrealistic and essentially a set up for kids going through the day tired, distracted and unable to concentrate. A push 45 minutes later in the day could make all the difference, and this would, within a year or two, be reflected in grades and college acceptance as well as graduation. The kids who do well here and now will do well in the future.

The national sleep foundation specifically states that “If teens need about 9 1/4 hours of sleep to do their best and naturally go to sleep around 11:00 pm, one way to get more sleep is to start school later”. This makes it clear that our solution has been scientifically proven to be extermely beneficial for students. Pushing back school is also good for students because according to this article, teens with poor sleeping habits “were more than twice as likely to use drugs, tobacco or alcohol”. Also, scientists have theorized that loss of sleep at the time of adolescence can cause permanent changes in the brain.


Student Sleep vs GPA
Here are our sources!<br>

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

i am not in support of sopa. piracy is not something that can be fully stopped, so sensoring the internet would not do anything except destroy the credibility of the united states. it would put us on par with china, north korea, and egypt. sensoring the internet effectively sensors every american's right to free speech and new technologies, contradicting the first and tenth amendments. this act would impact me because it would force me to start actually paying for music and movies. piracy does not affect me or my family in any way other than me downloading all of my music illegally.
the boycott against sopa supporters
wikipedia's protest against sopa

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

the website i looked at was the site of the Westfield Tennis Club. this site has a fixed sidebar with ten links in it to the left and a fixed content box to the right. when you click on a link, it redirects to another page and the content in the box changes. for example, on the main page, the content does not describe the history of the club. but on the history page the content changes and describes the history of the club. nothing else on the page changes except for the content box, and this happens with every link on the page.

Thursday, December 22, 2011