This semester I’ve been lucky enough to retain a lot of information about exploring and creating my digital portfolio. While The Connected Educator taught me many new things, I also could not have learned everything I did without the help of Professor Calderwood. I have learned about social media etiquette, how to grow my PLN, and much more.
One thing that The Connected Educator taught me was to use a consistent username throughout all my social networks. I started to do that and I thought it was very helpful. I was always forgetting usernames and passwords so this really came in handy. It also told me that growing a PLN would take time, effort, and determination. Boy was that true! If it wasn’t for this entire semester I would not have known where to even start. I am now much more comfortable with social networking and understand how I can use it to my advantage. I was even lucky enough to have the honor of the author of The Connected Educator, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, follow me on Twitter!
Although I already had a LinkedIn account before this class, I never knew about the groups I could join. Groups allow you to connect with others, view and post jobs, and make business connections. I also learned a lot about Twitter. I never used Twitter the way I do now. I enjoy
mentioning companies and people, and even loved getting responses back! Twitter lists were also a new thing introduced to me. This was awesome because it organized my tweets into categories. It is very helpful, I believe, because twitter can sometimes get a bit overwhelming for some people.
Throughout the semester I’ve used many new sites. One of my favorite ones was GoAnimate. We were asked to make a 2-minute commercial for our major. I never really used a site like this one before. It was also very easy to navigate through. Another new tool I learned to use was different types of presentation sites. Instead of just using PowerPoint, we were taught about Prezi, Google Slides, Powtoon, Office Mix, and one of my personal favorites, Haiku Deck. I used
Haiku Deck for two of my projects in this class, and even a project for another class. I know I will be taking all of these sites with me into future classes because they really are more interesting than PowerPoint; especially for a communications major.
Every single thing I have learned from this class will stay with me throughout my career and life. I have learned when to, and when not to, post something. I know now to THINK before I post and watch my online reputation. I will always be professional and have the right sites to build good information of myself online. I also had the chance of having very creative classmates which made the experience that much better! Exploring Your Digital Portfolio, #GEN2243, has been a very rewarding class and I would recommend anyone at Stockton to try and take it!
Chapter 9 of The Connected Educator was called “What the Future Holds”. It states that Connected Learners know that the internet is not only a great curriculum resource, but even more, a learning resource. The web is used to find people, share insights, opinions, and exchange ideas. As Psychologist and computer scientist Roger Schank states, learning is about adding new knowledge to existing understandings. It is also understanding that we sometimes have to unlearn, to learn new material. This then allows us to be able to innovate.When you are thinking about change in education and technology, you must change everything about how you have learned. Four core components should be kept in mind when you understand what change means: Knowledge, Pedagogy, Connections and Capacity. We are lucky enough to live in a time where technology offers integration in learning and education. We cannot simply just read this book and leave all the information behind. We have to bring what we learned with us in order to be successful in the real world.
This past week we had a Google Hangout with Robyn Hrivnatz, who is the Marketing and Educator Programs Manager for US EDU for Microsoft. Although she is in the Education department, she talked a lot about social media and technology. She said it is very
important to use and watch social media to understand what the competition is doing. It will also be beneficial in making the right business decision. Being an employee at Microsoft, she said she is able to post freely, but must make it known that she works with Microsoft. Therefore, she is not allowed to share anything on disclosure, and was trained. Robyn actually transitioned from education to tech, having a minor in computer sciences. She changed her career because she explained that she loves the “pluther” of information out there that we can learn about. Video technology is one of her favorites, which I thought was pretty cool because I love video technology as well. She admitted that she misses having that student-teacher connection, but she loves her job and is happy where she is.
For the duration of class, we were told to get into groups and were each handed a Makey Makey box. We were told to put it together, with no instructions. It was hard at first because we all didn’t know where to start. We then decided to plug in the USB to the computer and connected it to the Makey Makey board. After some trial and error we figured everything out. We used items that included bananas, play-doh and aluminum foil. It was a fun group activity and luckily I had a very hardworking, easygoing group.
Chapter 4 in Untangling the Web, talks about social networking skills. Technology in the past two decades has certainly made its mark. TodaysMeet is a backchannel website that a teacher can use for discussions and classroom interactions. It can be private, or even public. One thing you can do is let them answer questions while watching a video.It can be useful for writing and answering questions.
Another network you can use is Skype in the classroom. Skype was one of the earliest online video chats to come about and has become very popular. Video conferencing has become a huge thing in businesses, as well as for individuals. You can now use Skype in the classroom to find other educators and experts, as well as the other way around.
An additional site is called Kidblog. Kidblog is a blogging tool that is designed especially to have a safe space for students to blog. What is great about this blog site is not only do you express your thoughts by blogging, but you get to create your blog look. An idea they give teachers is to have a Drop Everything and Blog Time. Once you teach a lesson, you can then give students time to express their learning experience. Edmodo is another useful site. It was actually one of the first social network sites assigned for schools. Teachers sign up for free, make a class, and the students enter a code to join the class. It is similar to a facebook page. Teachers will be able to post assignments, questions, quizzes, polls, and notes online for everyone to see. They can even add documents. You can also broadcast messages to the class, subgroups, or an individual.
The last social networking site they give us is Twitter. This semester is really the first one where I have used Twitter for social networking through my major. I never fully understood how I can use it, but now that I do, I understand how beneficial it can really be. You can send a direct message to someone, post a tweet, and connect. By
hashtagging you can find certain tweets, as well as, connect with a certain company or individual. Tweetdeck is a way that you can keep track of certain steaming tweets. You can filter them into different categories to help stay organized. It can seem like a lot to handle, but when you stay organized it really is beneficial.
Pinterest has become a new phenomenon that shares ideas through pin boards. You can create different pin boards for different subjects. It is almost like bookmarks for the internet so you can save ideas and come back to them later. Teachers have recently began using pinterest to their advantage. If you are new to Pinterest it can definitely be confusing at first. The website gives us examples of how beneficial Pinterest can assist teachers. You can start by finding lesson plans and other ideas for subjects. There are pictures and craft ideas to decorate and rearrange your classroom. You can even use it to find field trip ideas. It is also helpful to learn new ways to teach a lesson, or even download some material. You can even share your ideas and pin it to share with other educators!
IFTTT is a website that allows you to make connections through social sites. You can choose one thing using the statement; if this, then that. It is also compatible with Evernote which is awesome. This Evernote article gives us 5
examples of IFTTT to Power your day. One of the combinations includes if you tweet, then it will save it to Evernote. The second one is if you make a Gmail purchase, it will send the receipt to Evernote. You can move tagged articles as research into Evernote, and can even send a text and include a # as a to do list and it will send straight to Evernote. Lastly, you can submit your fitbit information straight into Evernote. These 5 seem very useful and I can’t wait to try them out.
Weebly is a website that helps build new websites! It is super easy and guides you through steps. They have released the third generation of their product, Carbon. Carbon gives you an app center that can help other business needs. The apps will allow people to see which ones are relevant to their business. Don’t worry because all of the apps in the app center will be approved by Weebly first. Weebly’s look as a whole has changed. It even is compatible for IOS and Androids now.
In class we were discussing websites we can use that will help us create a website. Google sites and Wix are two of the websites we learned. What’s great about these are that they are both easy and free to manage and work with. One of my favorite sites that I will be using to make my own website is Weebly. It allows you to pick a theme that you want your
website to have. You can drag and drop text and images onto your website where you want them. There is no coding required! You can even make an eCommerce store.
Social Media certainly has it’s way of getting back to you. Sadly, for Justine Sacco, it ended her career. Just before she got on an 11 hour flight to South Africa she tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”. With only 170 followers, Justines tweet ended up going viral. The top trend of that day was #HasJustineLandedYet?. It was truly a disgrace because she has South African family and she had embarrassed her own heritage. She was the Senior Director of Corporate Communications at IAC. You would think because she worked in the communications field she would know not to post something as inconsiderate as she wrote. This is just one example, of many, how social media could really hurt you. It could have easily been avoided if she was either told, before she was hired, about posting certain things to social media. I think any type of company holding a social media etiquette meeting would definitely be beneficial, and maybe even save someones career. Sometimes people post things as a joke, but they don’t consider what it could actually lead to. Always remember to THINK before you post!
Chapter 5 in the Connected Educator gives us some tools that will help support Connected Learning. It tells us one major tip that we should follow is to use the same username and password for all these sites so that you will never get any confused. Social bookmarking is a great start on how to stay organized. You use different categories in order to make different folders and know which one holds what. They suggest using a website called www.delicious.com. It is an easy way of bookmarking and
you can also use it to search like a google search, but it will search using your interest in mind. In order to build your PLN you can use resources such as: blogs, google reader, podcasts, microblogs, twitter, wikis, and many more. All of these will be most useful for yourselves and your classroom. The chapter also gives you many online tools for social networking. Some included: Ning, Classroom 2.0, TeacherTube, and Netvibes. All of these tools would be useful for both teachers and students. While you use all of these websites it is important to make sure you know how to manage your online reputation. In order to do this you need to make sure you track yourself and watch what you are posting. Be professional at all times and make sure you use the right type of websites to build good information of yourself on the web. As long as you are cautious you should be good to go!
This week in class we played with some new APPs that used augmented reality. This includes making an image more enhanced by sound, picture or other real life information. Some of these APPS included: Space Needle, Anatomy 4D, ZooKazam, Spacecraft 3D, and Quiver. One that really stood out to me was Quiver. Professor Calderwood handed out two sheets of paper for students to color. Once they were done he collected them and opened up the Quiver APP. Once you open it, you aim the camera onto the coloring sheet and it brings it to life! It even uses the colors that you used to color in your picture. I really do wish I had these apps as a child in school because I think augmented reality is really going to help further children's learning experience.
During class we also had our 2nd APP Smackdown! Alexa Seary introduced an App called “Remember the Milk”. It is basically an online to-do list and task manager. What I really liked about it is that you can set reminders that will pop up to remind you what needs to be done. Many people these days are obsessed with their phones and are always looking at them so these reminders can reiterate when you need to accomplish the next task before it is due! I also tend to have problems keeping things very organized, so I believe this APP will be very helpful for me.
According to dictionary.com, augmented reality is described as, “an enhanced image or environment as viewed on a screen or other display, produced by overlaying computer-generated images, sounds, or other data on a real-world environment.” Drew Minock explained the best way he likes to describe augmented reality is to picture yourself walking in the halls of Hogwarts. If you have ever seen Harry Potter, you know that all of the picture frames in the halls are moving. Each picture can talk and they are all interactive. What’s really cool about augmented reality is that it’s just like that! It makes the boring world in front of us come alive. You can take a simple piece of paper and make a 3D figure pop up above it from your piece of technology.
ZooKazam was another of the APPs we got to experiment with during class last week. You can start by downloading the APP to your Apple or Android devices. Then you can download the grass pattern, or simply use the back of a dollar bill. The size of the target will affect the animal size. There are many animals you can use from dinosaurs to insects. Once the animal pops up you can see the lifetime & status, size & weight, and their habitat & diet. This type of augmented reality will change the learning education of children. Instead of learning by hearing, kids will learn by reading. There are even separate modes for teachers and students.
Google cardboard was another APP we got to play with in class. It is a very simple concept that allows for virtual experience to all with little to no cost. It has actually helped a woman see for the first time in 8 years. The patient, Bonnie, had Stargardt disease, that is a form of vision loss which can lead to complete visual loss. The
cardboard shows a stereoscopic image that you can view from a phone's image that delivers the same image to each eye. For whatever reason it was, this was enough to help Bonnie see for the first time in eight years! It is inexpensive because most people already have a smartphone so they just need to download the APP. Cardboard viewers can start at $20, or even be hand made at home. There also are other things to purchase such as plastic viewers that have head straps and can be worn without holding for a small cost.
Last week in class we discussed online presentation tools to use in the place of PowerPoint. Some of them included: Office Mix, Sway, Emaze, Haiku Deck, PowToon, and GoAnimate. Office Mix is pretty awesome because it is like Powerpoint, but you can have slide recordings, quizzes, screen recordings, screenshot. It makes up for the the features that PowerPoint was missing. Sway is another Microsoft product. It is similar to google docs as it will let you invite other people to edit the one document at the same time. You can also embed a PowerPoint into it. With Emaze you can either create a new presentation, or even upload a PowerPoint and it will "Emazify" it.
This week in class we had a google hangout with Astronaut Abby. Abby is a first year college student that wants to be the first astronaut to go to Mars. She told us how her mother was always very supportive when she started talking about this when she was just little girl. Of course, in the back of her mind she thought it was absurd. She continued to stay supportive and tell her to focus her pursuit of study in math and science. Not only her family, but her friends too , were always there when she needed it. Abby told us that if you think something is important enough you will find the time to do it. She is a part of MARS Generation, that is completely voluntarily run. There is a board of 4 people, then professionals in the space industry, social media industry, and a handful of others not in those industries that
volunteer their time. There are about 15-20 people working with them. Something very important she told us was that when you make a new connection, within those first 24 hours, you should contact them and send them a personalized message on linkedin, twitter, email or whatever social media account they give you. It is very important so that person remembers who you are and can possibly help you make other connections. If you wait too long it could be awkward if they do not remember who you are.
Prezi is a presentation tool that more people are starting to use as an alternative to PowerPoint. Instead of flipping to slides, it zooms over to the next part of your presentation. In the article for “A “how to” guide on using Prezi in an academic environment” , it reminds us that even though it is a great tool to use, you have to know how to use it. What’s good from presenting a Prezi is it immediately gets the audience's attention. When they realize they aren’t sitting through a boring PowerPoint they become intrigued. Your ideas are also allowed to be drawn out the way you would like. Whereas PowerPoint seems to almost force you where and how to put your important information. On the other
hand, because you are allowed to be more freely on Prezi, sometimes people tend to overdo it and make their audience dizzy with all the movements. By doing this they tend to forget about what the true meaning their presentation is about and just make it all about the movements. Some tips they give us are: Coherence matters, use the top-down full presentation view, take responsibility for the motion sickness, choose your visual theme early, and make sure you sign up with your academic email address.
Sway digital storytelling is a new part of Microsoft that is another substitution for PowerPoint. It has been made for today’s technology use with phones, tablets, laptops, etc. Unlike PowerPoint, the purpose of Sway is to show information easily, clearly, and quickly. They can also be easily shared and embedded. Sway is designed so that the presenter should follow a storyline. This flexibility allows for a more free flowing presentation. It does not allow for many adjustments, but because of this, it keeps the presentation
easy to follow. By doing this it also reduces the amount of time you have to spend on editing it. You can view a Sway presentation either horizontally or vertically. Once you know how to work Sway, you can decide if it is the right choice for the type of presentation you are making.
I have just recently been acquainted with GoAnimate. It allows you to turn a script into an animated video. It offers backgrounds, music, templates, and characters; which allows someone who maybe isn't that artistic to successfully use it. You basically set up every scene and then it collectively adds up to a full video at the end. Both teachers and students can use it for lessons and presentations/projects. A good thing about the final video is that not just anyone can find your video online. It can also not be published publicly without a teacher approval. This will allow a fun new way to teach / learn a lesson in the classroom environment. I also believe it was very easy and enjoyable to make.
In chapter 3 of Untangling the Web, it presents us other presentation tools other then PowerPoint. PowerPoint is used majority of the time for teachers and students to present projects. While some are okay, many can put you to sleep. It starts by telling us about Slideshare; a website that lets you upload your presentation to share with other educators around the world. Poll Everywhere lets you ask your classroom a question and they can respond via text message. Voicethread allows you to share pictures and videos and you are able to comment on them. While all of these sites are very easy, the more you go in depth, the more features you will find out about them. One of the last ones the book goes over is Prezi. Prezi is an awesome presentation site that is similar, but better than powerpoint. Instead of clicking to another slide, the Prezi zooms over to another piece of content.
Neil Pasricha had been going through a rough patch. His wife told him she didn't love him anymore and soon after, he lost his best friend. One night he came home and came up with the idea of making a blog, 1000 awesome things. The blog included the little things that make your day that you never really think about too often. He was soon given a Webby award for best blog. After that, he put his thoughts into a book, The book of Awesome, which was the #1 International bestseller for 142 weeks! The book focuses on the three A’s: Attitude, Awareness and Authenticity. Having a great attitude no matter what pain you have and moving forward is a good start. Being aware is knowing that you have seen everything for your first time once before. Authenticity is just all about being you. You should put yourself in situations that fulfill your heart. Neil concludes his TED talk with telling us how we only have 100 years to enjoy all of these little things in life. He stated a quote that really stuck out to me, “You will never be as young as you are right now”. This really hit home with me and made me realize that I need to truly live every day to the fullest because you don't know what tomorrow will bring.
Rita Pierson has been an educator for over 40 years. Because of this, she states how she has seen basically all school reforms. There are many students who suffer from poverty, negative peer influences, and lack of support from family. One thing that she stresses will help teaching students with these things are relationships. Valuing and the importance of human relationships are needed to educate. Teachers need to want to have a healthy relationship with their students in order to successfully teach them. The significance of leaving a legacy is also very important. For a teacher to touch a student's life, is truly when you know you have had a successful educator.
This week in class we had a google hangout with Adam Taylor. He is the founder of SciStuChat and a high school science teacher in Tennessee. He educated us on how he started #Scistuchat. Scistuchat is a twitter chat with high school students and scientists. It all started Mr. Taylor's second semester in 2011. They had an online chat with a scientist outside of the classroom, while the students were at home. Later on, another teacher wanted to join in on it, and they started doing this once a month. Taylor first found out these scientists were on twitter from a magazine. He then found twitter lists of these scientists and started contacting many of them. He also told us about one of his most memorable chats which was talking with the US Department of Energy. We also spent a portion of class making a LinkedIn account. Luckily, I made one last year so I know a lot about the website. However, I did not know that you can join groups. I joined a few Social Media and Media Marketing groups. In these groups you can connect with others, post and view jobs, and make business contacts. It is really very helpful and I'm happy I learned that this is available on the site.
mentioning companies and people, and even loved getting responses back! Twitter lists were also a new thing introduced to me. This was awesome because it organized my tweets into categories. It is very helpful, I believe, because twitter can sometimes get a bit overwhelming for some people. 
Haiku Deck for two of my projects in this class, and even a project for another class. I know I will be taking all of these sites with me into future classes because they really are more interesting than PowerPoint; especially for a communications major.
