After the past few weeks of 'themed' blogs I am glad to finally get the chance to write a weekly evaluative blog like in the first year.
The first week kicked off with a slightly strange start as the first 'day' back at college after the holidays was to give a presentation to the first years. A voluntary presentation? What was I thinking. Luckily however it all seemed to go ok, despite me both forgetting a drink and being asked some very in depth and intelligent questions. Of course there was also no getting away from the question - Mac or PC?
However with this presentation out of the way, it was time to concentrate on the second year and the upcoming CSS and professional projects. Thursday was a very hard day as unlike the first year we weren't gently eased into the work load. Instead, as soon as we had received our new student ID cards, we were straight into a lecture regarding our first assignment.
The 'Box Clever' assignment sounds quite fun. It is very similar to the CSS Zen Garden website where we have to create our own style sheets for a given HTML 'template'. Although my knowledge of CSS is very limited, I am hoping that this assignment will advance my skills dramatically but at the same time it is quite a creative assignment which is always a good thing.
The big assignment of the year so far is the 'On the Job' assignment. Although techincally the iMe assignment is the longest, I feel that this assignment will be the most beneficial and make us work the hardest.
This has shown already, as only three weeks in to the second year and already I have being investigating setting up my own content management system and attempting to get my head around PHP and MySQL. This caused mass headaches for the first week but I now seem to be getting the hang of it, and with the help of Craig's books he has lent me will hopefully improve even further.
Regarding the assignment, tomorrow is our first meeting with the client and I am the 'official' minute taker of our 'company' which requires me to get dressed up. Laughs all round tomorrow then.
So far this year, one thing that I think has improved already is my time planning skills. I have managed to do my time plans at the beginning of each week, and keep them up to date throughout. This will be a massive help not only for me to plan the assignments better, but will also hopefully help in me achieving higher grades.
My aims for the next week are to:
Complete my designs for the Box Clever assignment
- Learn some more CSS
- Learn some more PHP/MySQL
- Complete any other tasks given by Craig B for the On the Job assignment
- Learn to speak in a less 'conversational manner' and a more 'academic manner'...maybe
If I can complete all these by next week then I will still be on track with my 'master time plan' for the assignments.
