Week 7-- Collaboration and Google Docs

Hello Bloggers! 

I'm back from reading week and I have the perfect website from my feedly reader to share! It was nice to be back home for the reading week but when I’m home all my meals get made for me, which makes it harder to come back to school and have to get into the habit of making all my meals myself again. This 11 Healthy 3-Ingredient Breakfasts is a great website to get you back into the groove of making your own breakfast again with the benefit of it being healthy. As for lunch and dinner, your outta luck;). Also, another great website to read is about A New Study Finds Out Just How Much Sleep You Should be Getting. This is a really good read because sleep is very important and it can either make or break your fun filled day of work and/or school. 

Karch, 2014

This week we learned how to use google docs which will help with our collaborative assignment that is coming up due. Collaborative work is very helpful as it aids many students writing public (Institute for Writing & Rhetoric, 2013). It helps by having peer reviewers go over your writing to make sure that it is readable to others in the general public. It helps note that the student's writing is not just for them but for other people in the community (Institute for Writing & Rhetoric, 2013). As for Google Docs, it is a processor that aids in collaboration with other people through creating and synthesizing documents. It can be used to create PowerPoint’s for presentations (including the one coming up), documents and spreadsheets. In a way, Google Docs is like having Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel all in one Webpage without the need to pay for them all (which I wish I knew this before). It is very efficient and is multi-purposeful. This week was my first time of hearing about Google Docs and I am very happy that I did because it will be used much more throughout my University years.As said earlier, the use of Google Docs can be used for presentations which allows for collaborative work to be done! This is great because you can work with someone on a project through this amazing tool! It contains a chat where you can talk live with your partners and work together to complete the project. 

With the addition of so many tools lately to my Personal Learning Environment, this tool can also be added to my network. Since this tool is multi-purposeful, it can fit under many parts on my Personal Learning Network. For starters, it will definitely go under Collaborating and Socializing. This is because I am using it for my Collaborative Google Docs Project for this class which means that I will be using this with my partner to Collaborate about Digital Health and Wellness. It can also fit under the category of Synthesizing and Creating because it is where we will be creating our powerpoint slides for the project. Not only can you create projects on this but you can create documents for school or work. 

With all the new tools that I have learned about so far within this course, there are so many things that I will be adding to my Personal Learning Network. My Network was small before but is slowly growing in a right way. I am building my digital Literacy and my technological skills every day!

Thanks for Reading! Until next time :)

Week 6 -- Evernote

Hello Bloggers!

This week, we talked about Evernote and all the good it has to offer. For those of you who have not been introduced to Evernote, I definitely think that it is a great tool to use for one's future endeavors. Personally, I haven't really used Evernote before, but after completing this session, I feel that I will be using it much more. Evernote grasps many different forms of information into one webpage (Hamilton, 2010)! You can have so much on your Evernote, such as notes, emails, photos, and even different web sites. It can hold as much information that you want it to hold, organize it and even share it if you want to (Hamilton, 2010). Also, with Evernote, you can tag key words throughout your notes and  if you want to just look at notes related to that key word, you can easily search it. It is almost like searching a hashtag on a Twitter account. This tool will be very useful in my educational activities because it is very easy to use and keeps all of your information organized, and I LOVE organization. I will be using this tool for most of my courses for things like,

Mergy, 2016

•            note taking
•            schedules
•            to do lists or tasks 
•            research project for ADED 1P32
•            drafts of my blog posts

The layout of Evernote is very simple and I like how organized everything is, which is why I will be using this more often than not.  

I think that this is a great tool for my Personal Learning Environment or Personal Learning Network because it can be used quite often. This tool is very multi purposeful, thus meaning that it can be used for so much stuff whether it is for school or home. I will definitely be adding this to my PLN because I will be using this tool for almost everything! Within my Personal Learning Environment, this would fit perfectly under synthesizing/creating or organizing content. Since this tool is very multi purposeful, it can fit under two categories within my PLE. Under the category, synthesizing and creating, it fits perfectly because you could be creating presentations on it starting with the research aspects and it will keep it very organized for you which is critical when doing research. It can also fit under the category of organizing content because it allows you to have different tabs on different topics and under each tab is a list of your notes in order from when you take them. This permits you to have multiple notes within one tab which is great for weekly schedules and weekly note taking. With the addition of this tool, my PLE is building up more and more each week!

Since I personally enjoy health and fitness, continuing on with a link from my feedly reader, Which Plays a Bigger Role in Weight Loss: Diet or Exercise? is a great website to read if you are interested in fitness. It is an educational website with a video which demonstrates weather diet or exercise is better for you. Being in the kinesiology field, I know that a mix of both is the perfect combination to a healthy fit life.

Thanks for reading!

Week 5-- Twitter and PLN's

Hello Bloggers, 

So this week I am posting another link that is of interest to me in the health and fitness world. The webpage, Will Power, Do You Have It? talks about goal making and sticking to it. We all know that there are some people (me being one of them) who make these goals to eat healthy and start going to the gym, but after 3 solid weeks of doing it, we drop out. This webpage is an awesome read that will give you more confidence and help you with your willpower.

Stauffer, 2015

This week we looked at a new tool on the internet called Twitter. This web tool is not necessarily new to the internet, but I have learned new ways to use it. Twitter can be used to share an idea or ask questions that anyone who has an opinion can answer. I have always used twitter in high school to tweet what I was doing or tweet song lyrics that I liked, but this week I learned that I can use twitter to share and discus information that is more professional and self promoting. One thing about Twitter that is interesting is the use of hashtags. With these you can type in key words on certain topics and it will locate information on that topic that others have posted. Its important to know that this is a huge part in collaborating with others as you can directly message someone, or through the use of twitter, talk to people to get certain ideas on topics of importance to you. This tool will be useful in my educational activities because I will then be able to communicate more with people in this technological and educational world. The most vital part about Twitter is that it fits within an individuals Personal Learning Network (PLN). A PLN is involved with the RSS feeds which includes many websites that are a part of your PLN. Klingensmith (2009), stated that everyone and anyone you interact with is a large part of your Personal Learning Network. Many educators today use Personal Learning Networks to find properties for the classroom, discover plans to provide students with as lessons, and to use as a collaborative network (Klingensmith, 2009).

A Personal Learning Network and Twitter both contribute to my knowledge because they both allow me to be social in the technological world and more cooperative in nature. It allows me to build a sturdier network and influence my Personal Learning Network with things like hashtags. In week 2 of this course, I made a Personal Learning Environment Diagram in which all of the technologies that I am apart of are included in it. This new web tool, Twitter, will definitely be an addition to my diagram as it is going to be something that I will use to be more social in the technological world when I am starting my career. I would add this under the category of Socializing and Collaborating as this is what Twitter is all about.

Thanks for reading!