Social Media for Educators
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Social Media for Educators Final Project Andrea Lown
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Transcript of Social Media for Educators
Social Media for Educators
Final ProjectAndrea Lown
Most Useful Tool - Pinterestwww.pinterest.com
● Prior to the course, I had only used Pinterest a few times, and I had never set up my own pins and boards.
● There are many ideas that I can share with my HACC students and colleagues to enhance both their classroom environments and teaching methods.
● Pinterest is very easy to navigate. I like how I can arrange my boards.
● A challenge of Pinterest is that you can spend a lot of time exploring ideas. I have found that some preschool teachers overuse Pinterest when lesson planning instead of using PA Early Learning Standards to guide their instructional decisions.
Successes● Although I had set up a personal Twitter account prior to this course, I never used it. I started a
new professional account and discovered how easy it was to use. I will be able to follow leaders in the field of early childhood education and Tweet my experiences in the field to share with colleagues and students.
● When I had applied for my new position, I dreaded the question, “How do you use technology in the workplace?” because I knew my use of technology has been very limited. Now I feel so much more comfortable with technology and feel like I’ve added several tools to my toolbelt.
● When I started with diigo, I was concerned that I wouldn’t understand it, but after spending time with it, I know I will continue to use both diigo and delicious as resources.
● My own children use Google Docs for all their school projects. Watching them do their work, I was really impressed with how the documents can be shared and teachers and classmates can insert comments. I also thought it was wonderful how they didn’t need to do “file, save,” as the documents were automatically saved. But, I was happy with Word and PowerPoint and didn’t want to learn something new. For my final project, I intentionally created this presentation in Google Slides so I would become more competent with Google tools.
Challenges● Because I will be beginning a new position later this month, I
had difficulty determining which tools will be most helpful for me. It would have been helpful to speak with my new supervisor prior to taking the class and learn what tools the organization currently uses so I would be able to focus on those.
● Although I set up PLNs in both diigo and delicious, I don’t have any colleagues who use them so I wasn’t able to share my bookmarks with anyone yet. I plan to use them with my HACC students and colleagues in my new position.
● Probably my biggest challenge was keeping track of my new account information for each tool. For some I used my home email, for others my HACC email, and I wasn’t consistent with the username I selected. For some I used arelown, which is the beginning of my home email, and for others I used aslown, my HACC username. To help address this, I added a note to Evernote with the accounts I created during this class.
My Collection of Projects
Additional Tool Explored - [email protected]
● I will use this tool to organize all my class notes and documents.
● It will be helpful to share class information with other instructors teaching the same courses on different campuses.
● I’ll be able to access my files from any computer, without having to carry around a USB drive and move files from my computer at home to work or email them to myself.
My perspective on Moodle and online learning
● What I enjoyed most about online learning is self pacing. I liked how I could spend more time on topics that were difficult for me, and if I understood a tool easily, I was able to go through the tutorials more quickly.
● I loved the organization of Moodle. I liked how I could explore the whole course and get a broad perspective of the content before diving into each section. It was so helpful to be able to go back and forth to different topics and revisit them.
● I found the variety of learning modalities helpful. I liked the combination of readings, videos, and projects to apply what I was learning. I also appreciate the rubrics so I knew exactly what was expected of me as a student.
● For online courses at HACC, instructors use the D2L platform. I have used parts of it in my traditional classes, but this online course has made me interested in exploring D2L more thoroughly. Not only would I like to take more online courses but I would also like to attend HACC’s eVolution Academy to be trained to teach online courses!
● I’d also like to use Animoto, Glogster, and VoiceThread with my HACC classes.
