Collecting all of my work into one place allowed me to see what work I value and how many map pins I have placed out in the wide world. I chose Weebly as my display case since I was famliar with the program and it has the professional look I wanted to model. I added all the social media icons I currently have accounts on, despite my lack luster showing on some (Twitter, Instagram). I went back and forth about Twitter and what account I would link. Most of my Twitter activity is posting events for my school and my personal account is mainly for me to gather resources from experts I follow. I ended up connecting both accounts. I linked a variety of blog reflections on topics I found interesting, creative, or show my new learning through Wilkes assignments. The vast majority of my is docuemnted in video and images. I chose to create my portfolio page in sections; professional bio, work with teachers, work with students, and personal learning. All sections truly represents my career as an digital learner and educator. I encourage visitors to read and listen closely to the message of creativity and collaboration my work samples represent. I believe in communicating and creating with technology and it has enourmous benefits for students, personally, educationally and eventually professionally. I love sharing my own work as well as my students but I am more careful about what is portraied online and what it represents of a students true self. I continue to struggle with the amount of information I post for the world to see. With identity theft, scams, negative and predatory behavior, I find it difficult to feel secure about the place I take within the world wide web. My view of the positive things a post can do for a student or its audicene, is tainted by the cyberbullying and technology addiction I am asked to help parents understand before innovation leaves them in the dark ages. Since having my own family, I have become more gaurded and thoughtful with each post and upload, only wanting to have a positive effect on their newly formed digital dossier. Creating this landing place for my work allows me some control over the message Amy Dent will send to the world.
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Update- 12/9/16 Found a way to show video
First thing I need to say about Live Webinars is how much I respect the engineers and presenters at the other end of the connection! I tested and tested and tested equipment, browsers, connections, software; you name it I tried it out. I never knew producing a LIVE web broadcast would be so trying. My biggest trouble came with plugins, loading, and updating software. I about never got a Java plugin to talk to my MAC. Through this challenge I learned about plugins and browser compatiabilty. It is true, you can find anything if you Google it so I was fortunate to figure out that my district was blocking a plugin download and that I needed to use Safari instead of Chrome for some instances. I only have access to district monitored devices so some software is restricted or needs a systems administrator to approve the downloading of software. Waiting on IT approval was time consuming but I now understand my district approval process and it connected me with an IT professional willing to explain the process. I am making all this sound painstaking but it was a valuable learning experience through failure. Under normal circumstances, I would use Google Hangout to produce a Webinar but I am already familiar with that product and wanted to try something new. I also had trouble with recording the Google Hangout in YouTube so I chose Webex to make the webinar magic happen. Liked Webex a lot. It was super simple and had a recorder embeded in the software so that was one less window to worry about. I tested out both ways to start an online event, start now and schedule. For the actual event, I used the scheduled method and sent invites to teachers who had missed my introduction to our Twitter Challenge during the regular scheduled meeting. Free version of Webex uses its own player so I am unable to post the recording. I have included the presentation slides.
I went looking for the perfect Webinar this week. To me the perfect professional development webcast is no more than 30 minutes long, between the hours of 3pm-6pm, and I leave with a laundry list of sites, apss, and gagets to test out. This week I attended a webinar hosted by SimpleK12 called Mobile Apps for Crafating Special Holiday Gifts. It began at 6pm and last exactly 30 minutes, including time for questions. Below is a tidbit of the live webinar I attended. This webinar was presented by Shelly Terrell who had a long list of accomplishments in educational technology and classroom experience. Just from the introduction, I knew this was a professionally produced, well reheared webinar that I was going to enjoy. The presenter used a slide format to share her resources and expanded her thoughts and helpful hints on projects, without trailing off the topic. She was sure to cover all device types, software platforms, and holiday celebrations. I took notes from the presentation and now have a page full of ideas, Apps, and websites to use with students this holiday season. This particular presenation would not be entirely appropriate for a class setting, as the material was geared toward teacher instruction , but students might watch it to find resources or project ideas if given an independent assignment where the teacher allowed them to create anything using any of the technology resources presented. Professional learning through webinar is a favorite tool for myself but I find scheduling a live webinar difficult. I tend to choose archived presentations for my presonal and classroom needs. You can better share a great webinar with students if it is archived and show it with multiple classes throughout the day.
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Amy DentInstructional Coach, tech geek, news junkie, and passionate about learning. Archives |