Another Blog

Now that we are into our second week of ICT classes, some standards have been set. Everyone in the class now has their own blog sites, and after taking some time to go through them all, I have my work cut out for me to produce something that can hold up to the quality of the other posts. So here is another random GIF to help keep my posts unique and memorable. This is how you must feel having to read all of our blog posts. Enjoy.

(GIF was found at the following link: https://www.pinterest.com/funnymemes/funny-gifs/ )

So, during class on Tuesday we were given a virtual tour of some of the useful curation websites that exist out on the vast chasm of the interweb, in the hope that we would find some of them useful and intriguing enough to try and to use in the future. To begin with, the one site that I used was Feedly, which helped to make it easier to go through and read all of the other blog posts that were created. It was great once it was set up, and much simpler in format and layout compared to how the Google+ page had been. What I liked most about Feedly was how easy it was to begin following my classmates blogs, and how I can be able to see when there was a new post for me to read. The only fall back of this however is that you no longer can see the personalization of the blog website which people spent time making unique to themselves, and only can see the actual substance of the blog post text.

The other program which was demoed for our class was the Google Docs, to give us a better sense of some of the possibilities that the programs could do. I feel like it is a great program for when working with other students to complete a project or making up a presentation together, since multiple users can be working together on the same document in real time. I feel like I need to take some time to become more comfortable with creating and using these documents still, however I plan on trying to become fluent enough in the program to make good use of it in a future classroom, since it has the potential to be extremely useful. The tricky part I feel that would go along with using Google Docs in a classroom is to make sure that it is being used appropriately and in a way that actually would be assisting in the discussion rather than becoming a game for the students. The main reason why I feel this is the case is because of how easily the mature Education students that we have in our class shifted into having fun with the program rather than answering the hopes and fears question that was asked of us. It makes me curious if there is some way to ensure a bit extra control for the teacher if they were planning on using the program, in order to make sure that it is actually accomplishing the goal they set out to accomplish, rather than having it turn into a joke task.

One other program that I felt like I needed to spend some more time playing with was called Symbaloo, which was a bookmarking program that you could personalize to have all of your favourite websites linked into and easy to find. For me personally, I think that having a place like this to keep a tab of all the websites that might be useful for you (and ones that you know you'll want to return to again at a later date) is way more beneficial than always saying that you'll just know and remember what or where you went that one time when you were simply surfing the web. This is something I am guilty of doing, saying that I'll remember, only to have that website slip from my mind when I really wanted to go there again, or forgetting where exactly I seen that one idea that I thought could be useful to bring up again.