Summer EME 6414- J Foxx

What a whirlwind crazy summer this has been, and not just because we seemingly navigated through a million Web 2.0 tools, but this summer was emotionally and mentally draining for a lot of us. We struggled but we persisted, and thanks to a very flexible and human instructor we survived and came out on the other side much more knowledgable of Web 2.0 technologies, social media use in education, and a multitude of things concerning that such as IP rights, ethics, etc.  I already took the time to discuss and reflect on the different tools for the semester so I do not want to spend time on that again. I will say that I took a few days this week to get caught up on reading your blogs over the past two weeks and I am going to miss you all, and the class blog, more than I realized. I was happy to see that a lot of the blogs I followed regularly are planning to "stick around" and I will keep all of the blogs in my Feedly for a while to see who I can stay in touch with. I do not plan ...

We had a two-hour meeting today with our union representatives about our school re-opening plan. We go back to work on Monday and not a single teacher has any idea what we are teaching, who we are teaching, and how we are expected to teach it. Talk about overwhelming and anxiety-inducing. I wanted to start lesson planning this weekend, and next week when we have our "preplanning" week but it doesn't seem like we will have an instructional plan in place. Why am I telling you all of this? To explain why I went down a rabbit hole reviewing our tools from this course over the past few days. I thought it would be a great time to explore some of the ones I only grazed over and decide if and how I can implement any in my classes this year- no matter which format I am expected to teach in.  I started with Sutori since I merely made an account during  Week 10 and never spent time exploring. First and foremost, the teacher tutorial is excellent! There are short videos, screenshots,...

After taking Week 10 and Week 11 off from blogging and participation logs it is refreshing to be back. I am going to use this first post to just talk about how excited I am about my produsage project! I used my third token for an extension so it isn't quite finished yet (I took three classes this summer and completed my internship) so as the end of the semester rapidly approached I found myself buried under work.  I cannot wait to share the project with you when I finish later today but I decided to build a project that I will actually use in my Sociology classroom this fall, assuming we are doing distance learning. If we are back in the classroom I can easily adapt this project to still include some of the Web 2.0 technologies with face to face instruction.  Last year I decided to have a class debate, on a whim, because my students asked for it. I threw together a lesson plan where we debated criminal justice reform, since there is an entire unit on crime and deviance in soci...

The struggle is real right now. I had a very difficult time forcing myself back to work this week and finishing our knowledge tracking project. However, I just keep thinking about how incredibly thankful I am to be taking this course at this moment in history.  I know social media right now is incredibly draining and we are all feeling that, but it is also becoming more and more important. I have been given multiple tools that will help me improve my teaching (if we have to teach online) and in traditional face-to-face environments. My eyes have been opened about how much I can learn from others on social media and how I can help others as well. Our society, even (or especially) while being quarantined, is more interconnected than ever and I had no idea how much that was true until this class. I truly think that I will keep my separate social media accounts that I created for this class and continue to use them for professional development and networking in education and instructio...

It is the 4th of July here and I spent my evening and morning with two very large dogs cowering from fireworks. This is not the most enjoyable holiday for our house so I plan on spending my day working. I wanted to provide a brief review of the Week 7 & 8 tools but also go a little bit more in-depth about my ideas and concerns implementing these tools in a K-12 classroom environment.  In week 7 we looked at various LMS's including Google Classroom, Edmodo, and Piazza. I was already familiar with Google Classroom and Edmodo so I did not spend much time exploring. We use Google Classroom at our school and each student is provided their own Google account. I love Google Classroom, for the most part, it allows for collaboration, it is fairly easy for the students to use, and it integrates nicely with our online grade book and various other web tools (like Quizzizz). I can also set up assignments in advance and really customize when it will post, due dates and times, and rubrics. My...

I took last week off for a much needed mental break and while I took the week off from blogging and posting, I did not turn my brain off. I have been thinking a lot over the last two weeks about this course. I  have learned so much and gained many new tools and resources. One of the readings this week discussed how math teachers use Pinterest to acquire resources for their lessons and teachers' use of social media for professional development. This has been something I have thought about frequently since our community assignment-how I am able to use various social media tools to continue my professional development, build a community, and learn from my fellow colleagues. This has been wonderful especially now being physically distant from my coworkers and fellow teachers.  However, last week and this week we have started discussing actually designing networked knowledge activities and using these tools in the K-12 classroom environment. This has been a little bit more tricky f...