post6

This has been my favorite class of all the classes that I have taken while in my EMM masters program. The content was relevant and interesting, the instruction was spot on, and most of the classwork was useful and not filler. Before taking this class I knew a little about html, but not enough to build a simple website. I had used html to build fancy mail merge emails, but knew very little about much else. I feel that had I actually been diligent with the assignments I probably would be even more knowledgeable about html, but I have to admit to not reading the book as I should have. Instead I skipped to all the grey boxes and just did what I needed to do to get the assignments done. I am looking forward to giving this book the attention that it deserves this summer. I am very grateful for the classwork that we did each week because it is a physical takeaway that I can use as a reference guide while building in html. I really feel that this quarter was just such a whirlwind that I never really got to give my classes the full attention that they deserved.

PLNs Blog Post 7

     Professional Learning Networks… gotta love them. I have joined multiple PLNs since becoming a teacher. As always, when I first join the PLN I am very active in both posting and responding to others in the network, but after a few months I get busy stop checking it as much and eventually I stop signing in all together. Thankfully I have found a solution to my deteriorating interest. Email and Google+. I have joined various communities on Google Plus and since I don’t ever go to the actual Google Plus site I opted to get emails whenever anyone posts in the communities that I am interested in. This is working great for my smaller moderately active communities, but I quickly learned that for some of my very large educational communities this was not a good option. I was getting as many as 30 emails a day from just one of the larger communities.

     So how did I use my PLNs? I really used them mostly like an RSS feed to keep up on the latest in my field of interest. However, a few days ago I was asked by one of my teachers about 3D printing, all of our schools have at least one 3D printer, with carbon filament. I had no idea if they could print with carbon fiber filament and the manufactures website was of no help, so I turned to Google+. Within 10min I had multiple responses from people who had the same printer who had tried printing with carbon filament. It was awesome.

Journal #5

        So, I've been using Twitter off and on for a little over a year and a half. I have found it to be useful for professional development in that I can search nearly the entire world, yes Twitter is that popular, for a keyword and find info on it.

     With the use of hashtags (#) people are creating searchable databases at the rate of nearly 6,000 tweets per second. Now, having spent more time on Twitter I can say that a whole lot of them are useless junk, but with the 500 million tweets that get sent out each day you can still find a lot of good stuff out there.