Google for Education Certification Exam Level 1 (Week 9)

Today was the big day. All our learning and creating and sharing was being assessed, and at the end of it we were expected to get a Level 1 badge. However I cannot show you what it looks like because
of this:

The excuses are:

• umm...
• it was...

No not really - I just needed more time. It took me longer than usual to get started. The questions were not too hard, I might say some were easy and I really enjoyed it. Perhaps I took too long enjoying the exam and eventually ran out of time. I got 20 multiple choice Q's and 11 scenarios and am guessing that the others got something similar. When the timer alert was on the "last 10 minutes" I still had 5 scenarios to work through. That alert sort of "woke me" up and the tasks were done faster. Clearly not fast enough as I was working on scenario 9/11 when the exam self terminated since it was 3 hours since I started. It does not help to note that only one person in the group got through today.

Note to self - 

• Google "Hangouts" and "Meet" are different and not interchangeable. 
• Youtube "watch later"  and "playlist" are also different.

What next: we have to wait 14 days to repeat the attempt so I will register some time after a week so that we can give it another go. 

STP's and Image mapping for sites: Week 6

As is the case every week, we learnt a lot of things in today's session. The best one for me was image mapping - I had seen this being used on a few sites but was not sure what it is called or how it was done. But having done it I can say with confidence that is is fairly straight forward. You just have to follow the logical steps, If you try to change the order it wont let you; and of course the feature wont work.

Here's a screenshot of my home page with an image of the 6 Standards of Teaching Profession. The area on the picture allocated to each standard acts as a link to a new page which has more details for THAT standard. To go to the page for standard 3, you click anywhere in the area of "Professional Relationships"on the image and this takes you there. Its that simple!

Getting this effect is not too hard either.

Step 1 - Map the image with (x,y) coordinates using pixlr as below. Notice the "plus" at the top left corner of the gold biscuit picture - the coordinates of the point are displayed at the top right corner of the screen. By moving the plus around the boundary we can get the coordinates for the entire boundary. Be aware that the boundaries should not overlap - potential problems!!

Step 2 - Enter the coordinates of the boundary and the corresponding url into the code (HTML)

For example: <map name="map1">
<area coords="162,58,254,15,333,4,440,16,533,56,422,225,346,207,272,225" href="https://sites.google.com/a/tamaki.ac.nz/mh-stp/home/stp-1" shape="poly">

<area coords="534,62,425,229,471,281,484,343,688,344,676,251,647,181,606,125" href="https://sites.google.com/a/tamaki.ac.nz/mh-stp/home/stp-2" shape="poly">
<area coords="688,351,485,347,473,409,417,467,518,642,590,590,655,497,680,428" href="https://sites.google.com/a/tamaki.ac.nz/mh-stp/home/stp-3" shape="poly">
</map>

Step 3 - SAVE, ofcourse you want to check that it looks fine and also that it actually works. That's it - done! finito!!