In the past two days the Earth Group has had two incredibly successful meetings and I can’t wait to keep moving forward with the projects. Not only have the projects been big in terms of the kind of information that different members were able to share about their projects but also because of the ideas we came up with together. Our first team meeting we had two big planning breakthroughs that I think will be really exciting for our final project. One of them was more logistical and involved us sketching out some ideas for what we wanted our story map to look like and how our pieces would all look together as one. After working on that for a while we had a very successful conversation with Tierney about different resources we could work with which has really taken us down an exciting path.
One facet of our webpage which I’m excited for is that as a group we discussed doing something similar to additional information pages. The idea behind them was that we have a lot of incredibly important and useful information that doesn’t quite fit into our story map but that we know people would want to learn more about. The idea we’ve been tossing around about that issue now is to implement a sort of side bar or tabs in order to organize these ideas. While that idea is really exciting and I hope it works out we had an even more exciting breakthrough in our team meeting tonight.
We got music to play on our page
It may not sound exciting, but Brian through a painstaking process of  forum post reading and youtube watching was able to embed music into our blog page that begins playing as soon as the page is opened. Likening himself to a hacker or an android he managed to save the day.  So far we can only use youtube videos but the fact that our page has a unique and awesome element to it already really has me excited for our final outcome. On a more logistical note we had a great meeting in terms of planning and I think that the ideas we came up with are going to really help us. Not only did we plan concrete meeting times for the rest of the assignment but we also put in place some really helpful deadlines and drafts to help encourage us all and keep us focused throughout the next few weeks of working on the project.
Additionally I’ve been getting better at finding images that may be useful to me like this one of Kublai Khan.