Journal Post #7

I have learned so much from my experience on Twitter. I never expected the application to be as useful as it has been to me. I’ve learned a lot about the benefits of social networking for education, like how sharing information can really open a teacher’s mind to new techniques or how to use different technologies to supplement their lessons. One thing I found to be particularly interesting that I saw on Twitter was an account that once tweeted out a link to websites where teachers can submit applications for grants specified for technology and could receive advice on writing their proposal. I never would have even known where to begin on grant applications, but social interaction allowed for me to find a starting point. One issue I have experienced, however, is the struggle of deciding whether or not to trust an account. When using a website, it is easy to find out if it is reliable, by using the strategies we have learned in class, but when using Twitter, it is difficult to tell if an account can be trusted because they do not give out as much information. One is fairly safe in trusting verified accounts, denoted by a checkmark, but if one wanted to follow another teacher, then one risks the threat of following and taking advice from a fake account. Despite this issue, I still believe that Twitter is useful in connecting teachers with colleagues and resources.

I have learned so much from this website assignment! One rather helpful skill I learned to do was how to set up a Google calendar and embed it into a website. Prior to this, I did not know how to even find Google’s calendar function, but now I am able to edit and share it. Also, I figured out how to set up a website. I always envisioned myself having a class website, but I had no idea where to begin; however, now I know that there are many easily navigated sites where I can start a website. On the website, I made for the assignment, I like the different pages I set up and the organization of the home page. My largest concern about my website is the banner at the top because I feel like the color of the text clashes with the color of the pencils. I tried different colors for the next and white looked the best, but I am still unsure if it is too difficult to see against the background colors. This will be very helpful in my career, as I can now create a class website to allow me to maintain good parent-teacher communication that is also easy to use. Next time, I hope to improve my font choices and figure out better ways to implement photos onto the page. My website is pictured below and can be reached here: http://sophiaeme2040website.weebly.com

Diigo has been a fantastically useful application thus far. After learning about it originally, I created a personal account that I could use for my other classes. I have found it helpful in documenting and annotating sources for a research paper I am working on for another class. As a teacher, this can be beneficial to teachers because it allows them to save useful pages, like articles they want to use in class or pages that offer insight into education strategies and share them with fellow educators. This can be especially useful for team teaching to share documents used in class or when reporting documents to supervisors. It would also be very helpful to teach students to use this because it can teach them the importance of maintaining good bookmarking early on in their education. Also, Diigo can help teachers meet technology standards in their lessons, like meeting the standard for digital citizenship through effectively using Diigo’s communication and sharing capabilities.