Blog 7: PLN

For my professional development network, I utilized Digg Reader as a source to collect information via RSS Feed. The main site that I received headlines from was Edudemic. The tagline or motto for the site is connecting education and technology. This is exactly what my professional circle of influence resides and I have learned some fascinating concepts with this reader. A recent article from edudemic talked about the advantages of utilizing Mac OSX Mavericks. This new update is free and my classroom is 100% Mac! iLife and iWork software updates are also free on contingency. The district techs updated all my computers automatically. Here is the direct link to the article.

I spent most of my time using the Digg Reader and Edudemic. I performed a trial with the affinity group Classroom 2.0. This was a group I found out I happened to be apart of about 4 years back. I revisited the group and I came to the same conclusion. I just do not have the time to sift through information and I lost interest. Same with Twitter; I am just not a big fan.

Through using my PLN, I came to the conclusion that I like the convenience of the Digg reader and how it brings headlines in my field directly to me. I am a creature of convenience as all my time is accounted for as a high school teacher!

Journal 6: Self Reflection

I feel very confident in this course and how I can apply the content to make my work more rich and compelling. HTML are the building blocks of a site and CSS is how you style your content. They work together in tandem to help users navigate a site. It is a good idea to separate HTML and CSS as much as possible so they can be used to make future sites with less work. Tables with invisible borders were originally used to organize content on a site before CSS became the mainstay.

The tables exercise in class was one of the more challenging class labs. I had never used tables in a design and to format them using code had a learning curve. Even though using tables to create a site are a thing of the past, it was good to get a feel of how to use them to organize information. Creating multiple columns and rows is not the easiest. Also, using spans required more intricate code. Here is my link to the assignment: Tables.

Since this is my class I am taking before I start my thesis project, I am trying to soak up as much tools and tactics as possible. I need to be able to create a compelling culminating project and I look forward to the challenge with my new skills!

Journal #5 - Twitter

My first experience with Twitter was back in 2009 as part of a summer technology training for candidates of the Clovis Online School. I was running for a part-time technology teacher position. I was learning new educational applications of technology including Moodle, wikis, RSS feeds, etc. Twitter was the prime social media that we needed to learn and connect to almost instantly. I was motivated to learn something new and how it could be used for educational purposes. I was widely impressed with how Twitter worked and how simple it was to use. I signed up and created a profile: http://twitter.com/coolhanddesigns. I have not done too much with it since then and I have barely updated it. I have lost interest and I just have found it to be boring!