Digital Publishing

Never before have I been exposed to digital publishing the way these websites show it. It really is amazing that you can create a whole magazine by simply using these online tools. Because I do not have any experience in using digital publishing platforms, it was very difficult to choose which one to use in creating my magazine product.

I really liked how issuu.com was organized on their home page. You can scroll through and see hundreds of different magazine covers about many different topics. What I did not like about issuu.com was how difficult it was to figure out how to use it yourself. There was no sign up, no video overview of the site, and no way of understanding how to even begin building your own magazine. Although I am sure if I did some Youtube searching, I could find some tutorials on issuu.com, I decided to look at the other options first.

Coverpage.com was an instant “no” for me. It is a digital publishing platform that is in app form. For this particular project, I did not like the idea of using an app. I did not want anyone to have download an app in order to see my magazine. Also, like issuu.com, there were very little tutorial helps and examples of why their digital publishing platform was so great.

Moving on from there, Scoop.it, Paper.li, Vudu.com and epublish4me.com all seemed pretty similar at first glance. They were all free, or had free versions of their digital publishing platforms. All of them showed examples of what it is, and some had a video showing why you should use them for your digital publishing needs. They all seemed to be fairly easy to handle, but in the end none of them stood out to me in a way that made me want to use their platform.

This brings me to Joomag.com. This platform was automatically a winner to me. First, it had a video that showed all the things you could possibly do with Joomag. Then, I looked through some of the examples and liked what I saw. It looked simple enough to use because they have templets that you can start with and then edit them to your liking. In the end, it was the fact that they also had designed their digital publishing to be mobile compatible that sold me on using this platform. Creating an account and finding a templet that I wanted to use was easy and I enjoyed creating my magazine over the Horizon Reports we read during this unit.

My final product can be found at the following link: http://joom.ag/YOlp

Please leave comments for my blog!

Zoom Conference #3

The link for our video discussion is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4GbowoqOc&feature=youtu.be.

For our Unit 3 video, all of us had chosen the same Horizon Readings. We chose the 2015 K-12 Edition: Important Developments in Educational Technology. This section took us through the time-to-adoption for certain technology in education. The time was spread out from one to five years or more in the future. Some of the concepts were ones that I have heard of before while other concepts were brand new to me and very intriguing.

The developments that I have heard of included Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), 3D Printing, Adaptive Learning Technologies, and Wearable Technology. We discussed that many schools and districts are currently practicing the BYOD plan for students. This allows students to bring a device from home and use it for school purposes. One thing that I love about this is the learning curve for dealing with technology is much smaller if we allow students and teachers to bring technology they already know how to use from home. Some great concepts that are farther away in the future include 3D Printing and Wearable Technology. I love these ideas too. 3D Printing will enable students to create something on a computer software and then actually print a model of it in 3D. I think this will greatly encourage students to explore career options like engineering and architecture. We discussed several different types of Wearable Technology in our video. To use Fitbits, Apple Watches or other types of this technology in the classroom would be great! Imagine being able to teach a health lesson and having students track their steps, sleep, diet, and other health related things on their wrist. Finally Adaptive Learning Technologies is probably the one that I am most excited about. As we discussed, this is a way for students to go through their courses in a personalized approach. The software will adapt to the student’s needs as they are learning. This, in my opinion, will allow teachers to take a step back from pouring over student data and spend more time creating interventions for students. The program I am starting this year with other teachers at my school has a system like this. It will show us exactly what each student is working on, how long they have spent on that topic and if they are on track, ahead or behind. One thing that some teachers are concerned about with this technology is that it will replace the teacher, but I think that it will just be a better tool for teachers to know exactly where their students are at any given time.

I had not heard of Makerspaces and Digital Badges much or at all before reading this article. To be honest, I disagree with the article in saying that Makerspaces is only 1 year to adoption. These labs seem pretty intense to implement with the cost of the technology and training teachers and students to use it. Digital Badges seem to be a very interesting development. Like we discussed in our video, these badges will show individual achievements of students. From what it sounds like, they will one day replace the grading system as we know it. I am not sure how this will work with how much GPA and Class Rank affects students in applications to universities.

This class is getting much smoother in the process of what is expected and I am enjoying the class much more this week than last. My group is working hard to stay on top of our assignments and I am proud of us for what we have been accomplishing.

Online Tests and Assessments

In the past I have used online tests and assessments many times to see how my students are understanding the concepts we are learning about. Usually I simply use Schoology as the platform for these assessments because my students are already logged into my class, but this year my students will not be using Schoology for my class due to the fact that they are all going to be a part of a new program and it has its own private platform for assessment within the content they will be learning. The other platform that I will probably be using a lot this year for surveys and reflections is Google Forms because all my students will already have a Google account that I can easily send them Google Forms to. Of course, for the purposes of this assignment, none of these options are available for me to practice with for various reasons so I went through the other options that were listed to see about practice with other platforms.

After going through all of the different platforms that were listed, I narrowed down the platforms I wanted to use for this assessment to two: Survey Monkey and Class Maker. Most of the other platforms, Quipper, Socrative and Quizlet, are great for classroom quizzes, but I did not want to have to set up a class just for the purposes of this assignment. I have used Socrative and Quizlet at times in the past and they are very user friendly, but I wanted something more adult-like for the purposes of this assignment. Blubbr was another platform available that I decided against. It is more of a trivia game which does make taking a test much more fun and competitive, but it looked more complicated to set up than some of the other platforms. The last option that I nixed for this assignment is Poll Everywhere. I have been on the receiving end of this platform many times at professional developments and was never able to actually participate because my phone does not allow texting to those shorter numbers. This is really frustrating so I decided that I did not want to even try to use this platform.

For my final decision, I opted for trying to create a quiz in both Survey Monkey and Class Maker to see which one was easier to make and send a link to. In the end I found that Survey Monkey was much easier to use than Class Maker. My survey ended up being 5 questions regarding Personalized Learning which was discussed in our Horizon Readings for this week.

Here is the link for my survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WBRJ5WV. Please take it and leave me feedback in the comments.

Zoom Conference #2

For our video this time we went in much more prepared I think than the last one. The link for our video is: https://youtu.be/dAmuDlb7XdI. Some of the best points that I thought our group made were regarding Integrating Technology in Teacher Education, Rethinking the Roles of Teaching and Teaching Complex Thinking. We all agreed that teachers are not trained the way they should be when it comes to integrating technology. From a pre-certification time, teachers need to be exposed to using technology in the classroom by means of blended learning. Many times also, teachers are showed something new and then simply are not shown how to actually implement the strategy in a meaningful way in their classroom. One thing that I particularly enjoyed talking about was Rethinking the Roles of Teaching. This is when the teacher becomes more of a coach or mentor rather than a lecturer. I love this concept because I have never enjoyed lecturing, but love helping kids discover who they are and what they want to do with their lives. Finally our discussion on Teaching Complex Thinking was very interesting. In the readings, they discussed that there are going to be 1.4 million computer science jobs in 2020 but only 400,000 computer science jobs to fill them. This is a scary concept. We really need to be encouraging our students, by teaching them complex thinking such as coding and data analysis to combat this shortage in the future.

All in all, I really enjoyed the reading this week and the discussion that we had along with the reading.

Blog on Blogging

A few years ago I semi-kept a personal blog. Having enjoyed keeping a journal throughout high school and most of college, I thought that having a blog would be fun. I stopped writing in this blog as life got busier through the years and I did not seem to have as much time as I used to. While I did stop writing in my blog, I never stopped enjoying getting my feelings out through writing.

On that note, this week has been highly frustrating in my class. The expectations have not been very clear from the beginning about what exactly we are supposed to do for the individual and team assignments. It took a lot of time to finally figure out what we were supposed to do. Once I did figure it out, I became excited again to get to working on this class. Applications of Technology is a big deal in education these days and I am looking forward to exploring different ways of using technology in my classroom.

This week our focus was on blogging in particular. As I mentioned before, I have always enjoyed writing about my experiences and feelings on a subject. I can definitely see how blogging could be something useful in education. Imagine a world where students kept blogs about what they are going through in school. Not only would it give teachers insight to what their students are going through academically and personally, but it just might help students to realize that they are not the only ones struggling with the things they are having issues with. Another thing that blogging could help with is keeping students in the loop on what is going on in each teacher's classroom. Simply put, blogging helps us get on the same level technologically with the students without fully entering the social media world and remaining professional.

The main things that I considered when looking for a blog site to use for this particular class was ease of use and familiarity. There are already several parts of this course that are pretty new to me such as video conferencing and creating our own website that I figured I should stay more familiar with my blog site. Blogger was the site that I used for my personal blog several years ago, although it looked a lot different than this blog does of course. It is simple to navigate and you do not get to bogged down with the templates that are available. I like how easy it is to set up and get started. The other reason I decided on Blogger was that it is already connected to my Google account. Recently I have been doing a lot with Google products such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Forms and many other products. I like the idea of keeping all of my information in one place.

Although I chose Blogger for my blog I have seen several examples from my classmates that are not Blogger and they are just as great. Particularly I like what some of my classmates have come up with on Wordpress.com. These blogs are neat and easy to navigate. I was worried about being able to comment on them without a Wordpress account, but it was very easy to do by just giving them your email and name. Some of the other blog sites that I browsed but did not think were as compatible for what I needed were Edublog.com, Blog.com and Tumblr. Edublog seemed to work much better for a classroom environment and the other two would be great for a personal blog, but not necessarily a professional blog.

All in all, I have enjoyed the blogging experience so far and look forward to continue using it in the future!

Zoom Conference #1

Today for my team for my INST 6031 (Applications of Technology) class recorded a discussion video on our assigned Horizon Readings. The link to these reports is http://www.nmc.org/publication-type/horizon-report/. We will be reading thoroughly these articles throughout the class, but for this particular unit (Unit 1) we just need to skim through them and discuss with our groups how they fit with a particular few ISTE standards for both teachers and students.

This experience was pretty interesting. We each skimmed through the readings and then video conferenced using Zoom.us. Throughout the conference we discussed the Horizon Reports and then recorded a video with a PowerPoint that showed the results of our discussion. This was a great way for us to connect and discuss different points of view. I look forward to our future discussions throughout this class and other classes to come.

Howdy!

My name is Lauren Aragon, and I created this blog to follow my time going back to school for my master's degree in educational administration. I am currently attending University of Houston at Clear Lake and looking forward to graduating in December 2016. That is if my plan works out the way I have it.

Currently I am taking two classes, Applications of Technology and Applied Statistics. I have finished two other classes already, Principalship and Multicultural Education. This fall I plan to take 9 hours then hopefully I will be ahead enough that I can slow down in the spring and summer 2016 before graduating in the fall of 2016.

Looking forward to the rest of this challenge!