A Song of Faith and Devotion

  My experience with EME2040 was almost entirely online outside of some interaction with my partners for the group projects. There were a variety of both upsides and downsides. On the one hand, getting my work done on my time was absolutely the best part of the course. I could work simultaneously on other projects and plan my week more effectively as a result. However, that is not to say there were not any negatives. The course work itself is just simply not that engaging. I wish this weren't the case, but the majority of the assignments just felt a bit like a chore when looking at what work I needed to get done for the week.  OER, or Open Education Resources, are a fantastic tool to take advantage of in the academic sphere. They allow for quick learning at no cost to the teacher. Being in the public domain has advantages, such as comparisons with other classes who can easily harness the same resources. If I were a teacher, I would absolutely use them in my classroom to t...

 The web design assignment taught me quite a few skills that can be used both educationally and otherwise. For one, I now understand the google calendar user interface and how to post it and make it available to view. I messed this up at first and fixed it later, which thankfully brought my grade back up, so out of all the things I did, this one is probably the one I am the most likely to remember. Another skill I learned was how to entice younger viewers to education related fun. The idea behind the site was to make learning fun for the students by incorporating very little educational syntax on the individual game pages. I believe this would be effective in an educational setting.   https://www.extrafuntopics.com/ In honesty, Diigo isn't the most complicated program in the world, and there are numerous educational websites out there like Diigo that I have used in the past. To say I learned much from using it would be a bit gratuitous. Rather, I refined my communica...

  As a resource, I did not find myself having any particularly strong feelings about Diigo as a platform. It seemed like just another academic sharing site that could be useful for in class communication. This being said, it was pretty barebones. As a teacher, it is unlikely I would ever find myself using this resource. If given the opportunity, I would probably opt in for something much more creative, for both the well-being of the class and myself.  In regards to the question surrounding the blogging itself, I don't mind blogging, but I don't really feel like that's what this is. These blogs are directed by questions and even have minimum and maximum requirements. To treat this as anything other than an assignment would be a bit silly, and I do not think it represents the spirit of true blogging. I cannot share my feelings on topics I wish to discuss, and even if I did, I would likely relate it back to the questions being asked in the first place like I do now. As a discu...

  Admittedly, I have not been using Twitter as long as some others in this class. As a platform, I only started using it at the beginning of my senior year of high school, so approximately the past two and a half years. However, I have not used the platform for much educationally, and I have only really used it to absorb entertainment related information. Mainly articles and memes. I have friends who use the platform that I am connected with. This being said, I doubt Twitter will have much future impact educationally or otherwise.  The digital divide is frankly, a scary concept. To think that the unequal access to technology can and will cause disparity in the workforce; I shudder at the thought. But I believe a distinction needs to be made between national and international digital divide. After all, a student in a poorer area of the United States will likely still have much more technological opportunity than that of students in war-torn Sudan. Funding for education based te...

  In my newsletter, I posed myself as a fourth grade social studies teacher, and I will continue with that line of reasoning here. One of the most interesting standards that I noticed surrounded identification of simulation ideas, such as imaginary and / or computer generated environments. As a social studies teacher, this is incredibly important: if not for simulated ideas, teaching history would be an impossible feat. As such, I believe these benchmarks absolutely would and should be implemented.  The resources provided on CPALMs for a social studies teacher primarily focus around lesson plans, and any one of these relating to the topic in class would absolutely help. It could serve as a guideline for me (the teacher) and help to centralize the subjects of the class for the students. As a resource, it could prove invaluable in saving time. Resultantly, I cannot now imagine a lesson plan in which I would not use it.  Being able to search the web efficiently allows you to...

  Copyright and Fair Use is a section of the law devoted to ensuring a lack of plagiarism and / or illicit financial gain by claiming another person's work as one's own. It is an incredibly diverse subject, so much so that there are law firms dedicated specifically to copyright law. The application as to how this could be important for teaching becomes obvious when one considers the modern technological sphere we live in. Even the misuse of images on a presentation or the use of copyrighted music in a class video can result in copyright strikes. Therefore, it is important to inform one's students about copyright and why it is incredibly important to understand.  Just like copyright, technology can detect quite a few other activities that we in the academic sphere hope to prevent against. Academic dishonesty is similar to copyright in this regard, as it can be easily detected using modern technology. Most education user interfaces are built to detect plagiarism, and other ...

  As far as Microsoft Word is concerned, I've been using the program for as long as I can remember. This applies to the entirety of Office as well. Before Google Drive and the related programs were released to the widespread public, every school provided access to Office on a fairly regular basis, and resultantly, I became very proficient with it at a young age. Furthermore, by the time I had reached High School, I became Microsoft certified in Word, as well as PowerPoint and Excel. Though it hasn't received as much attention from me in college due to the prominence of Docs, I do find myself using it occasionally. I assume this will be the case more so for this class. Out of all the ISTE standards for education, the one that means the most to me was most certainly the 'Educators continually improve their practice by learning from and with others and exploring proven and promising practices that leverage technology to improve student learning'. The logic behind this is s...