Weekly Report and Reflection #6

Greetings everyone,

I am please to know that my blogs are viewed and read by my fellow classmates and others, the increase in blog views each week motivates me to put out quality information we all can relate to. This weeks assignment introduced a new tool to improve my educational activities, EVERNOTE is essentially an online notebook that allows one to  add, organize, and store information such as websites, pictures, and videos. With Evernote you can organize information in multiple notes giving the user the opportunity to have different notebooks with different sources of information. Evernote is also useful because the user can create a to do list, this is beneficial at an academic standpoint because it keeps the user informed and up to date with current due dates, assignment and more.

Having information on a given topic and having a valid and reliable bookmark for example my topic on digital literacy allows me to store important information that I will need to accomplish my task and use it at a later date. Evernote can be an essential tool to my personal learning experience by adding a resourceful device that categorizes information into its own section. Explore a given topic and find plenty of resources and add it to an individual note. This can help in many other classes I am currently in and I can use it as a database to keep notes and important information.

Having more resourceful tools increases my digital literacy by improving my functional skills, so I have thoroughly developed aptitudes online. Secondly it challenges me to think critically and analyze digital content and information. Lastly it helps with my ability to find and select information and I can evaluate whether the information is quality or not. An article on my Feedly provided me with three useful tips, first tip is to capture each note in steps this means if an idea was to pop in your head and you want to remember it create a new note and add it to your Evernote. Tip two is organize work in notebook this is done by placing all relevant work into one notebook, the benefits is that all your work is in one place and you are not in a disarray to find your information. Last tip is connect with work chat this is an online tool that allows you to share your information with a team of people and provides a setting of collaboration.

Signing Out
Jesse

Weekly Report & Reflection #5

Photo from: Aerogramme Writers' Studio

Hello readers!

This week the goal of my ADED class was to explore the social media site Twitter. The majority of teens today would recognize Twitter's iconic little blue bird as Twitter is one of the most popular social media sites, along with Facebook and Instagram. Many teens have or have had Twitter at some point, including myself, as it was a social trend that definitely swept across North America. However, in the teen world Twitter is mainly used for meaningless entertainment and a lot of people see the site as "stupid" or "a waste of time". While exploring Twitter this week, I was able to see how much more Twitter can offer than what I had previously thought. 

Previously, like many other teen's twitter accounts, my twitter had no purpose. I mostly followed friends who would post when they were bored and I would only go on Twitter after I had exhausted all of my other social media sites and I had nothing better to do. After seeing how Twitter can be used as more of a professional and formal learning environment, I "relaunched" my Twitter account so that I could really benefit from what Twitter can do for me! To help me do this, I used my super helpful tool Feedly to search articles that were about Twitter and I came across a great one that really assisted my relaunch:

27 Super Easy Tactics To Boost Your Twitter Strategy

Firstly, the article made me think about what I really wanted to get out of Twitter. I came up with a few of my own personal Twitter goals to help get me started:

1) I want my Twitter to share my knowledge and personal insight to others in a respectful manner 

2) I want to be able to consider the different views that my new friends are sharing with an open mind

3) I want to interact with my classmates 

4) I want to find people around the world with similar interests to me (global communication is so exciting!)

After I had established my goals I was able to easily think of what I should put in my bio to help me achieve them. The article advised me to make my bio very strong and really utilize the limited characters you have. Therefore, I had to briefly but effectively construct an introduction to myself and what my interests are. To help display my personality and interests to others I chose a picture of myself during one of my Men's Physique competitions, since health and fitness is my primary interest. Hopefully, my new Twitter bio will attract followers who also like health and fitness and are interested in what I have to share. 

Lastly, I tried to build my Twitter audience and engage with my classmates that I thought I may work well with. Twitter's famous hashtag made this very easy because I could see who else was using my classes hashtag  and then explore their page! The DM feature of Twitter then made it possible to chat with them and build a better relationship. 

Since Twitter is known for being a quick and easy way to share on-the-go, I am confident that with my new Twitter account and my new friendships with my classmates I will learn a lot more about personal learning networks throughout the rest of this class. Twitter is an easy app to use on my phone and now in my spare time I can effortlessly read my classmates short tweets to enhance my own research into PLNs without being overwhelmed with information! 

Until next time,

Jesse Tubbs

Weekly Report & Reflection blog post #4

Hey!

Now having being acquainted with Diigo I discovered a new way of saving useful information and viewing at a later date. The benefits with Diigo as a book mark is that I have the ability to access the wanted website at any device of my choice such as my Iphone, my laptop or my friends computers. The tools, tagging and description is helpful because it reminds me briefly before viewing the content of the website what the website is about. I find this website very resourceful and user friendly. These tools will help my education in various ways, one being when I am writing an essay for one of my classes I can bookmark important websites that I want to cite and use information to write my essays. Also I can locate the websites I need from any computer, so if I have to write my essay in the fishbowl at Brock instead of at home on my laptop, I will still be able to find the websites I want with Diigo.

Valid and reliable book marks contribute to my work in building knowledge in quite a few ways. One being that I am able to save creditable websites and view at any giving time. This will help because I can have a large amount of websites on many different topics at my disposal. So if I am able to view such quality websites at any given place.

The curation tool I got accustom with was Google Alert and I find that it was a resourceful tool as well as extremely informative. The tool updates its users with information that is not even circulated in social media, giving its users new updated information before it is even released to the general public. These tools can enhance my personal learning environment with added new information in various categories such as news, sports, science, health just naming a few. I feel it is important to be knowledgeable any much more than what we study in school for our majors and in week two it challenged us to think about what we want to do in 5 to 10 years. Having a wide spectrum of knowledge will help make that choice easier because it will allow us to know what we like and dislike.

I am broadening my digital literacy, since the beginning of the class I been learning so many new and interesting things that the internet has to offer. This class has been helping my digital skills in learning how specific sites operate and revealing sites that are abundant in knowledge. Being able to connect knowledge from my Google feeder to my learning is beneficial because I am learning things that I may of never came across. Or as I mentioned in my forum events that I may have missed for example the Super bowl, I am caught up with.

Signing Out
Jesse