Another day another marvelous blog. I'll admit I'm getting used to doing this every week to the point where it will be weird when I'm not using it next semester. But that is a sob story for another time. I can't reiterate enough how much I'm enjoying this Education tech class. I guess it's because the class is based on the career I want to pursue. Whatever the case, I'm not complaining haha. So last week the class was introduced to Diigo. I never even knew it existed. But let me tell you, this website is so useful for teachers. Not only is it a great way to communicate and share ideas with other teachers, but it is also very easy to navigate and branch off to other websites of choice for further development. When I first made my Diigo account I was a tad confused about what it did, until the whole class started including our specific sources and commenting on each others post. That was when I realized how effective it was. The entirety of the set up is that of an annotation website. A direct way to find sources and cite them accordingly. Getting to mess around with the different components like highlight, and page markers was very interesting. But there was one thing I really didn't like about the website, and that was the difficultly to add on to my previous post without it refreshing my comments to the top of the list. I know there was a way to keep all my thoughts in one place, but it was hard for me in particular to pick that out. So I kind of gave up and just let my posts be sprinkled throughout the rest of the page. There were so many comments to the point where it was hard to pick out certain things I wanted to look at. To that extent I feel like a little more organization would help the layout of the site more. Other than that I loved getting to use Diigo for the first time.
As for the concept with blogging, as I kind of grazed over the topic earlier. I love it! I like being able to talk about things in an informal way and share my opinions on the different educational resources we are learning in class. There are so many perks to blogging. It helps me to find the words to my thoughts. I don't like that I can't seem to indent my paragraphs, but I don't want to bash the whole concept of blogging based of my insistent need to be punctually correct. I shall let that slide... Back on the topic of how much I love blogging. First of all I have tried to blog In the past and I thought you had to pay for a fancy website and get a subscription for all the perks. But Blogger lets us have it all. There is so much to decided between, from layout, to the style of my blog and I think that is so cool. I like how simple it is because of course I'm not technologically inclined. I prefer to have my hand held during the process and this website does that. So far though blogging, I have learned how to embed links into my blogs, as well as the creative licenses. Doing these blogs weekly means having a chance to learn about different educational tools and share my feelings on them. In short, blogging is awesome.
Web 2.0 tools include the resources I just talked about, as well as things like PBworks, and Twitter. All the things we've been introduced to in class. But there are mountains more of 2.0 resources that I find are very useful. For example a website called Edmodo. A website that I majorly used in high school to keep up to date on what my teachers wanted us to know. Edmodo is similar to Canvas but without the grading. It's a way for teachers and students to contact each other, and for teachers to include links to further information that they may be teaching that week. There is even an app. Teachers can send pictures of worksheets, and students can comment, or like the "posts". Within the app students can have different sections like a planner, a place for notifications, and even a discovery tab where they can search endless educational games, and created content. The website online has the same components and more, aiming to help teachers manage the classroom and engage with their students. Even parents can have an Edmodo and use it to stay up to date on what their students are learning!
Edmodo.com
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