One Last Blog

Hi everyone and welcome back for another week of my blog.  You can find me on twitter @barlottn  This will be my last blog of the semester.  I may resume my blog in the future but for now lets just day this will be my last blog.  This semester really seemed to fly by.  For some reason it seemed to of faster than my first semester at Stockton.  All in all it was definitely a successful semester.  I had my struggles during my first semester but I have definitely grown up a lot and become more professional since then.  I have learned to manage my time better and to give my very best on all my work.  Some of my classes have been introducing me to the professional world.  When I first signed up for Exploring Your Digital Toolbox I didn't really understand what I was getting myself into.  I figured it had something to do with technology but I didn't know exactly what it meant.  After taking this class I'm definitely glad I took the chance on this class.

This semester I learned a lot of new things in a short amount of time.  I had been on Twitter for some time but I learned that Twitter can be used as a PLN or a personal learning network.  My previous experiences with Twitter had been with my personal account which I used to communicate with friends and stay current with all the breaking news.  I never thought of it as a way to network myself or to use it in a professional way.  I learned that Twitter is a great way to network myself and it could even lead to a future job or professional relationships.  I also learned about linkedin which is a great app that helps you make professional connections.  I have already made a few connections on linkedin and its something that I will use more in the future when I look for a career.  Haiku Deck is another tool I will use in the future when creating presentations.  You can check out my previous blogs for my Social Media Project that I created about Larry Johnson.  And last but not least I used Weebly to create a professional website.  This was an awesome experience.  Creating a website brought back memories for me dating all the way back to high school when I took a web design class.  Web Design was one of my favorite classes in high school so I was pretty excited to hear that our final project was to create a website.  Feel free to check out my website and let me know what you think.  Any type of feedback is greatly appreciated: professional website link

Overall I really enjoyed this class and I will miss it.  This class has added a lot of great tools to my tool belt that I will continue to use.  This class also helped me develop myself in a professional way and taught me how to use Twitter the right way and to not abuse it which could hurt me when I try to get a job.  Thank you professor Calderwood and I would recommend your class to anyone at Stockton University.  

The future of a connected educator/Circuits

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog for week 10.  I can't believe this will already be the tenth week of my blog.  I only have a little over a week of school left.  It feels just like yesterday when I was at Ocean County College and now I'm almost done with my first full year at Stockton university.  Now let me get to what my class did this week.  This week class was very different.  Professor Calderwood had us work together in groups to make a circuit.  I remember building circuits my senior year of high school in physics class.  Lets just say anything science or physics related is my least favorite and probably my worst subjects.  So I was definitely a bit weary of this activity.  In the end it was enjoyable to work together with my classmates to build a circuit.  We use the circuit to operate the game frogger which was on one of my classmates tablets.  We were able to get the circuit board to work like a controller so we could play the game it was pretty interesting.  After that we played guitar hero with a cardboard cutout of a guitar.  We used play doh as if they were the buttons on the controllers.  We put the play doh on the cardboard and connected the wire to the play doh.  It was a fun activity.  Here is a picture of one of my classmates Jake playing the guitar:

I also read chapter nine of the Connected Educator this week.  The author talks about how social media has impacted and changed his life for the good.  He's been able to make so many relationships with other teachers, authors, and experts.  Without social media he would have most likely never of met this people.  His journey into connected learning is something he will never forget and most likely never give up.  You never know what the future holds for you.  The web is a place where connected educators can go out and find people to exchange thoughts and information with.  The web is so much more than just websites and databases with articles and other types of information.  Go out and make connections with people that could last a lifetime.  Don't just be a teacher become a connected learner so you can expose your students to a new wealth of knowledge.  It's impossible to master all the knowledge out there but teachers need to be able to expose student to all the knowledge out there.  

Thats another week of my blog.  Next week will me my last blog.  Until then be safe everybody.  

Creating Websites Can be easy

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog for week 9.  I hope you didnt miss my blog too much and if you did don't worry I'm back this week.  You can find me on twitter @barlottn.  This week I'm going to talk about social networking tools and how to create websites.  First, lets talk about social networking tools.  Social media gets a bad reputation at times because some people use it improperly or it can get you in trouble if your venting problems or opinions.  With all that being said its still a great tool for schools to use.  Being involved online with social media is great for staying up to date with all the latest education and technology.  Being social online will allow for the best education for any student today and in the near future.  There are so many great web tools out there for students to use so that they can express their opinions and talents.  TodaysMeet is a great way for teachers and students to communicate.  TodaysMeet gives teachers the opportunity to create a private back channel can be used to discuss and document classroom interactions.  This is a great way for students to have their questions answered even when their not in class.  Another great communication tool is Skype.  Skype is one of the earliest video chat technologies to gain significant popularity.  It allows two people in different places to have a face to face conversation.  Skype is an awesome tool for teachers.  Teachers can get a guest speaker and have a live interview with that person for the entire class to experience.  Edmodo is one of the first social networks designed for the classroom.  Edmodo is a great way for teachers and student to share assignments with each other.  Teachers can sign up for free with Edmodo and create a digital class for them and there students.  I got most of this information from Untangling The Web.

Now I'm going to talk about integrating websites with social media.  First, I'm going to talk about IFTTT.  IFTTT stands for "If this, then that."  IFTTT's are great for saving you time and can be used as  short cuts or reminders.   IFTTT allows users to create "recipe's" which are a chain of simple conditional statements which are triggered by other web services like twitter or Instagram.  Here are some examples.
1. This recipe will make it easier to change profile pics.  When your Facebook profile changes so will your twitter profile picture.
2. When someone tags you in a photo on Facebook it will automatically be sent to your dropbox.
3. Receive a text when the weather changes.
4. If your a reader you can have an email sent to you when a new free e-book is added to the top 100 on kindle.
5. You can have your tweets sent to a google spreadsheet.
6.  You can create a google calendar of your tweet schedule.
7.  Add Instagram photographers to a twitter list.
8. You can create a photo album with iOS and have them automatically uploaded to Facebook.
These next few recipes are for Instagram users:
9.  Send tagged photos to tumblr.
10. Post Instagram pics on twitter as a picture.
11. Save all Instagram uploads to a folder in Google Drive.
12.  Have your Instagram photos sent immediately to your Facebook album.
I hope you all can use some of these great recipes.

Now let's talk about creating websites.  Creating a website sounds hard but its actually easy.  There are a few websites out there that are designed to help create websites and its super easy.  Wordpress, Wix, and Weebly are just a few great website to help with creating your own website.  Here's a video on how to use Weebly:

Wix is also a great website to use for web building.  They have a bunch of great templates so that you can develop a website rather easy.  Just plug in any information you want and Wix will help you create a fantastic website with ease.  These websites do all the heavy lifting so you can develop a website without having to pay for it.  I hope you enjoyed my blog.  I will be back next week.