Wrapping It Up: A final reflection on Web 2.0 tools and a final search for myself on the interwebs

Here we are kids: the final week of our ETEC class on the wonders of Web 2.0 tools. In the past 6 weeks, I have taken crash courses for numerous apps and tools to make learning more meaningful. There have been ones I’ve especially liked and those that I can honestly not find a place for in my personal or professional life. Either way, this has been quite an educational journey.

Being a kindergarten teacher, I had difficulty finding the relevance of several of  these tools for my classroom. That would have been a personal drawback for me regarding web 2.0 tools in general. Not every tool is suitable for every level, nor is every tool suitable for every content area or assignment. As with any educational resource, the relevance is everything. And the mental obstacle to overcome is to accept that it is ok to not be able to use everything you know. 

Another thing to be wary of is the whole security issue for anything dealing with communication through the internet. Even something as simple as creating an account to play a game needs to be regarded with caution. In discovering web tools to use in the future, this is something I need to take care with. The ease of finding something for my kids to do does NOT outweigh my responsibility to keep them safe. 

On a more positive note, web tools can be great for allowing kids to be more creative and hands on. For those students who may not be good at reading long novels or writing research papers, these apps provide alternate methods for them to show what they know.Our kids are learning skills they can use in the job market so this technology is preparing them in ways traditional learning/teaching methods cannot.

In all of my playing and exploring, I found that the tools I learned the most from were the ones I was most interactive with. For my final project I used Screencastify. I literally had no idea what to do with it and consulted a YouTube video and my teenage daughter for help. This turned out to be the coolest tool of all. I could record, edit, narrate and share videos of what I was doing on the computer (I know, how groovy right?!) What this made me want to do however was watch a movie on my computer and narrate it MST3K style. I have ALWAYS wanted to do that and now I can!! 

But seriously, I think I learned the most from it because I interacted with it the most. Honestly, I had no choice. I had to get this grade in and that was the way to do it. I wouldn’t want my students feeling so cornered, but I do recognize the value of learning how to use something that may be intimidating and mildly scary and overcoming that to produce something that I can be proud of. Was my project the most polished? I am sure not. But was it more than I thought I could do when I first read the assignment? Definitely.  And that’s the important part.

The second part of my “wrap it up” blog is a return to my original vanity search to see what else I could find about myself now that I was more internet savvy. I know-- this was the nail-biting point for me too. But I have to say, not much had changed. I searched under my married name, my  maiden name, my username (since it is the same on every social media platform). I searched adding my city’s name. I searched adding my previous city’s name. I thought I would find more information, especially since I have renewed my Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr accounts. I was mistaken. I still found my information on Spokeo and Whitepages and Facebook. I discovered my kindergarten YouTube playlist was one of the first results for my username search. But I have to say, I didn’t come across anything else. I am mildly bothered by this fact and am curious as to what I did wrong. On a positive note, I am not easily found online. Rather, information about me is not easily found online. Better still, not much juicy information is found about me online.

...you know, just writing that makes me a bit uncomfortable. Our digital footprints are so much more lasting and far reaching than we would like to think. It does us well to keep this in mind when guiding our students through the wonderful universe of the internet. 

Well, it’s been a journey, kids. Now excuse me, while I go try to scuff out my footprint as much as possible. Stay safe, keyboard warriors.

Social Bookmarking

This week I had to use a tool called Diigo to bookmark pages I found interesting and would want to revisit. I thought I was already doing this through my Google toolbar, but ok, I’ll go with it, 

First I had to download the widget to said toolbar. I had to use my personal laptop for this as I’m not allowed to download anything to my school laptop. There’s not really much of a difference except for the little blue “d” in the corner. When I click on it, I get a few options. I can save and bookmark the page, I can read and annotate, I can annotate it as a PDF, and I can annotate it as a screenshot. In other words, I can write all over the page. That could be cool, except I really prefer pen and paper if I”m going to highlight or take notes. I know it’s not feasible to print out every webpage I find just to mark on it, but for social things, I don’t really make notes. For professional things, I have notebooks for the courses I take, the PDs I go to, the planning I do. I don’t feel comfortable typing virtual post-its onto pages. I just don’t. Not to mention, there is research that shows you retain and understand more of what you are learning if you write it down (pen and paper) than if you just type it into a computer. 

Diigo also give the opportunity to share pages via Facebook, Twitter, Google, email or you can send it as an annotated link. Ok. That’s useful. I already share pages like that on Facebook and by copying and pasting links in email. What Diigo does is saves me the couple of extra steps of finding the FB logo to share. It really is incredible easy to send something I like to whatever platform I choose. 

Like incredibly easy. 

I mean, I could fill up feeds all day with stories about cupcakes and kindergarten and Sons of Anarchy. But I won’t. (sorry)

So after playing with this little blue d all week, I have to say that I’ll use it for the share capability, but really not for much else. I have other tried and true ways for the other services it offers--the bookmarking and the annotating. And since my students are 5 and 6 years old, I honestly don’t see a way for them to use it either. Diigo= 6/10. Would probably download it again. 

Aggregating Pages

No, these pages are not full of ill will nor do they cause it. Although, when I first read the instructions for this week’s assignment, I was sure that this was the week I would throw in the towel. First, I had to know exactly what “aggregating pages” was. Then, I had to do it. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

What a relief to find that all this entailed was putting a number of webpages onto a single webpage. The platform I used for this is is called Protopages. I had to check out some sample pages before I knew exactly what the finished product should resemble and after about an hour or so of fiddling around, I think I got a reasonable facsimile of what this “aggregation of pages” should look like. 

I needed to include my blog, my Twitter feed, YouTube playlists, and any other relevant information I felt like adding. The default page already had some newsfeeds included like Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, ESPN, and Pop Sugar. None of them I really follow, but they are interesting enough for me not to delete them off my page. 

Now when it came time for me to actually add what I needed to, I selected the “add widget” option and was able to select what kind of page I wanted to include. The easy ones were the Twitter feed and my e-portfolio page. For the blog and playlist URLs,I kept getting an error message that said I couldn’t embed directly onto the page. I had to use YouTube to find a video that walked me around it. Basically, I had to enter the link as a Widget Sticky Note for the blog and then treat the video playlists as bookmarks. It’s tedious to explain, but that video (that I embedded on said page) does a decent job (although the speaker does like the monotone voice). 

It’s pretty convenient to see all my stuff on one page. I like that I don’t have to open app after app and have all these tabs open on my phone or laptop. But like anything new, this would take some getting used to. I don’t foresee using this for my students, but to keep track of all the apps and pages I use at school, this could be groundbreaking. I’ll have to continue to play around with the page and see what exactly it can and can’t do. Only then can I decide if this is a cool once in a lifetime toy or something that can actually go the distance. 

YouTube and Twitter Adventures

This week my educational technology adventure required me to explore and play around on YouTube and Twitter and do some searching for relevant and helpful information. 

Now I have had a YouTube account since the beginning of time, but I don’t upload videos and I don’t share playlists or anything like that. Besides for personal custom music use, I use it to play music and videos for my class that I don’t want to or can’t find anywhere else. The reason I like to sign in with my account is so I can revisit my favorite, oft-played videos and I don’t have to search for them time and time again. Why not make a playlist? you may ask and quite simply, the reason is because I am too lazy. But the lazy days came to an end this week when that became part of my weekly assignment. I was to search for videos that explained how to use Twitter, talked about web 2.0 tools in education, basic information about technology in education, and stuff I would use in kindergarten. 

At first, I had to click on a few things to figure out how to get to where I could create a playlist, but once I figured that out, the rest was cake. What was tedious about it was searching for videos worth including. I didn’t want to include something I wouldn’t actually use and like any bit of results you get from research, you have to filter through them to figure out what is trash and what is treasure. The only playlist that didn’t put me through this was the one I made consisting of some of my favorite songs. Those links were already on my watched a helluva lot of times list so all I had to do was copy and paste. This part of the assignment was easy for me and not too difficult to figure out. 10/10 wouldn’t mind doing it again.

The second part of this assignment was to check out some Twitter hashtags and continue playing with this need for current information RIGHT NOW! I still refuse to see what makes this better than Facebook. I can search for a page like I can search for a hashtag and get pictures, videos, and stories just the same. I’m one of the few who a actually doesn’t mind a long post, so the conciseness requirement of Twitter doesn’t matter to me. 

Some of the hashtags I checked out were #kindergarten, #duallanguage, #SEL, and #activelearningframework. I chose these hashtags since dual language kindergarten is what I teach and the other two initiatives are ones that are in place in my district. They all provided me with great ideas and I loved that almost every post had pictures or video. When it comes to kindergarten, I cannot stress enough how visuals help me plan my lessons and centers. I will definitely be returning to these tags to get more ideas for my classroom. What did surprise me was that the last tag for ALF gave me posts that were from my district and from schools that I know. I thought mine wouldn’t be the only district with this initiative in place and was expecting to see posts from other cities and states. It was refreshing to see how committed my district is to this and how they are using Twitter to communicate their experiences with it.

Overall, this week was enlightening. I was able to watch a bunch of videos and get a bunch of ideas for my class. YouTube is something I will continue to use often, but now I have the convenience of all the videos I need in one place. I still am not sold on using Twitter for my kids, but seeing such relevant results from this adventure makes me think I may check in a bit more often than I have been.

Twitter in Education

So my assignment this week, whether or not I chose to accept it, was to evaluate the use of Twitter as an educational tool. For anyone who has read my class discussion posts, you know that I am not technologically savvy nor particularly adept with Twitter. So I’ve been clicking on things and exploring feeds to see exactly what this medium entails.

Probably what excites me the most( -_-)is the idea of being able to search for topics using a hashtag. I can immediately see the relevance of this if I were to be teaching a middle or high school class, and definitely if I were teaching multiple courses with a multitude of students. This would allow for conversations to happen even if the students do not share the same class or even if they don’t know each other and have only the course in common. Take, for example, any online class, to include my current one. We live in different cities and will likely never meet, but this class makes communication essential. We are able to share links, pictures, thoughts in an instant and, if the audience is aware, we are able to receive feedback in another instant. This is what I find to be the most valuable part of Twitter, I think. Our need for simplicity and instant gratification is met with this tool. 

On another note, I can see using Twitter to have my students keep up with current events. Say they were assigned a research project dealing with something happening in the news currently, this would be a great way for them to choose a few useful hashtags to search or resources to follow and be able to stay updated. If I taught middle or high school, or even upper elementary (5th or 6th grade), I would probably use this for at least one assignment. However, I teach kindergarten which is a whole other game on the ballfield. Since their reading level is emergent and the idea of current affairs is hazy at best, this would NOT be a great tool for me to use. I could perhaps use Twitter to keep in contact with parents, but I already have an app for that. 

My app of choice for communication with parents is Class Dojo. It provides me with the ability to share photos, events, messages with parents, teachers, and students. Most parents already know how to use it and I feel it is a higher level of professionalism than Facebook or Twitter. 

Twitter seems like fun and I can see the benefits it could bring to the classroom. But I don’t think it’s suitable for the early childhood grades. It lacks the relevance, I believe. Like most social media platforms, it depends on the purpose and the audience. It is not good for all of the people all of the time. 

Following My Digital Footprint

So, blog, we meet again. I haven’t written in a while simply because I haven’t been required to. In my quest for a degree in library science, I have been exempted from blogging for my last two classes. But alas, the time for that exemption has expired, so here we are.

My first assignment for this new class was to perform a vanity search for myself and see what kind of results I could find. Admittedly, this is something I have done before and found little information. Good thing. When I sat down to try again and go a bit more in depth, I have to say I didn’t find much more. I use my married name still even though I got divorced almost 8 years ago, so this time I also searched under my maiden name to see what I could see. 

My married name gave me the same Facebook result I have always gotten. I make it a point to set all of my accounts to “private” just because I don’t like people and I don’t want them to find me. I was able to see all the posts on my timeline though and I need to figure out why this is so if my settings can’t get any more “private-er”. I didn’t like seeing this as one of the first results.

Also under my married name, i found that I was a speech pathologist and a real estate agent. Man, I wish! My income would sure be better than what teaching is giving me now! In addition, I have also lived in Fresno, CA and Washington State Who knew? My pictures are pretty awesome. I look like I am in my early 20′s instead of my early 40′s and I have great hair. Honestly though, I am really relieved that my mug wasn’t popping up on search results, even when I got a few pages in. 

As a side note, but related, my daughter saw what I was doing and did a search for herself. There were about 2 dozen pictures of her with family and/or friends that came up because her father had posted them on his social media sites and tagged her in all of them. Her father is extremely overprotective and very controlling of where she goes and what she does, so this infuriates me. My daughter is 14 years old and I have seen enough Dateline and Investigation Discovery to know that the internet is NOT the place for a 14 year old girl’s picture to be. Unfortunately, even if the tags were removed and the pictures taken down, they will always be somewhere online. Just like herpes--it may go dormant for a time, but will come back with a vengeance at the least opportune moment. 

Continuing with my own search, the only remaining relevant results I found were on, the Whitepages, Spokeo. and Ancestry.com. I found myself on Whitepages under my maiden and married names. It listed my phone number as my grama’s disconnected number and gives my addresses as my mom’s old residence and my dad’s current home. When I clicked to see more about myself, I was redirected to another Michelle’s page which I consider to be a good thing.

Spokeo had me listed under my maiden name. They misspelled my mother’s name and considered my father’s name to be one of my aliases. They also told me I had two relatives I had never heard of (all of the other ones listed were legit though). 

The only information I got from Ancestry.com was my marriage listing and the name of my ex-husband. My divorce record wasn’t available and since I wasn’t going to pay for any site so this was as far as I got from them. 

There was a people finder site that compiled a whole record of my information and for the low low price of $23, I could find out all I wanted to know about me. Umm...sorry, but no. While I am curious to see how deep their information search goes, I am not going to spend money for something that I can’t completely trust. 

Now, although I am not much of a social media user aside from Facebook, I do have a Pinterest account that I visit occasionally, a Twitter account that turns 10 years old this year (!) that I forgot I had, and I think there may be an Instagram account floating around the cyberverse. I think of myself as an observer. I don’t like to be interactive in things, but rather just sit on the sidelines and pick up what I can. So most of these accounts I had to open so I could sit back and watch. Kind of like at a strip club--even if I don’t want a dance, I still have to pay to hang out. 

I LIKE the fact that I didn’t find much about myself. I haven’t been in the papers or on tv. I never did anything really remarkable or really horrendous. I can’t see much of a reason why I would be all over the internet. I want to fly under the radar as much as possible. Hopefully that’s what my (lack of) results mean. 

Exploring Eportfolios

So this week we were asked to venture into the world of eportfolios. I didn’t know what those were, but I know what a portfolio is and I know that when an “e-” is put in front of a word, it generally means “electronic”. Therefore, I assumed an eportfolio meant a portfolio stored and accessed electronically. Much to my pleasure, that is exactly what it is. But where my learning came in was when I realized what exactly can be included in an eportfolio. 

Now I have compiled a physical portfolio before--one to showcase my work as a potential teacher. It consisted of lesson plans I wrote in college, papers I had researched, and my educational philosophy. It wasn’t difficult to do, but it wasn’t in demand either. Interviewers did not ask for it and when I mentioned it, they did not seem interested in seeing it. So I did not update it or offer it any more.

But this class made me revisit the idea of portfolios and refreshed my mind on how they really can be a valuable tool of assessment. I am lucky in that I am a pretty good test taker, but not everyone is and I have plenty of students that are not. For this reason, portfolios--both physical and electronic--can be a great means to evaluate what a student knows and how they can demonstrate that knowledge. A regular exam or single assignment only tells what that student knows at that given time. Not to mention, these papers only include what the instructor specifically asks for. There is typically not any room for a student to show their individuality or creativity. And if what the teacher is asking for is not an area in which that student shines, it will appear as if the student did not grasp the concept of the lesson when in fact they may well have, just are not able to demonstrate it in the required way.

As a graduate student entering the world of educational technology and library science, I have more to learn than what I already know. I prefer to yield to my professors and follow their expertise in the field until I can feel that I know enough to judge what is valuable and what is not. Because of this I think it is better for my educational path to be guided by their questions and prompts and allow them to decide if I am learning what needs to be learned. To be quite honest, I would also prefer this method if I had a choice between being guided and being given the independence to show what I know and see where it fits in. I wouldn’t want to waste my time on some big project or paper only to see that it fits nowhere in the curriculum of my degree plan. I would also be self-conscious of going down a path that is in a completely different direction than what is expected.

The natural next step of this assignment was to find a site that would allow me to build an eportfolio to my liking. This required a bit of research, but I was able to narrow down my choices rather quickly. I investigated Weebly, Word Press, Edublogs, and Pathbrite. Let it be known that I am not only a graduate student, but a POOR graduate student so if a site asked for payment, I abandoned that option. I found this with Weebly and Word Press. However what I did find on Weebly that I liked was the option to imbed video, slideshows, and photos. I think that with my class of kindergarteners this year, this would be the preferred way to promote our class and the activities that we do. Pictures and videos of my students would showcase their work more accurately than written pages (although of course, there would be growth in the written aspect as well). On Edublogs, I was too baffled by the format of the page. It appeared best suited for a teacher who monitors a group of student blogs rather than a promotion of one’s individual accomplishments. It offered a way to share links and lots of text. In a way, it reminded me of Class Dojo. And to be quite honest, if Edublogs is that similar, I would prefer to use Class Dojo. This brought me to Pathbrite. Pathbrite most resembled the professional eportfolios I had looked at prior to my explorations. It provides a place for resumes and professional accolades and well as personal interests. Actually it provides the blank space and the flexibility to fill it with what I want. But in the time I have explored it, it seems user friendly and professional looking without being too complicated. Since I am only in the beginnings of my eportfolio, this may change. I may find it too confusing or difficult to upload documents or pictures or may just decide I would like a different format. However, for the moment, this is what I was looking for. I hope that now that I have the vehicle with which to display my knowledge, it will be easier to just add artifacts as I continue my professional journey.

The following link will take you to my newfound eportfolio site...still under construction.

https://pathbrite.com/Christinem737/profile