Blog Post 8: Teacher Webpages, Diigo, and Teaching in Technology Innovation

    When I was at school a lot of my teachers had Weebly websites. I don't know why this made me believe that I would innately know how to use Weebly, but it did, and I was surprised to make an account and realize that it is not as easy as it seems. It was really fun to discover the endless amounts of features that could all make the coolest website, I learned a lot. The assignment itself was challenging, however, it was pretty fun to experiment around, and also all of the requirements allowed for a finished web page with a lot of information. If we didn't have to do all of those things I would have never seen the cool features that Weebly had to offer, and finding out how to do certain things makes me feel like I have a shot at making a decent teacher website in the future. Especially when I look back at it now, I can reference a webpage and all the components we had to add in, stuff which I would have never done unless the assignment challenged me to. The assignment also made me consider what should really be on a teacher's website because you want to have as much info in there, but you also can't crowd it too much as to have the navigator get lost. Choosing the right resources was also something the assignment taught me, especially since we had to do resources for students and parents, stuff which I never had to consider. Here is a lonk to my webpage: http://colondeferiaeme2040.weebly.com/about-me

    The more we use Diigo in the class, the more we see all it has to offer. I accidentally downloaded the Chrome Diigo extension, but I also think it was a pretty happy accident because I don't really regret it. Literally every website I go to and every video I watch, a little icon pops up saying that I could annotate and bookmark it. Although I'm not interested in bookmarking everything, I find myself thinking that it is nice and convenient to always have the option to. As we have used Diigo more, I started to take notice of the group features that are really helpful. You realize why it is called a social bookmarking tool, because the abilty to collaborate with the group sticky notes and comments really bring out the social aspect of the name. Thesefeatures would be incredible useful in groups, especially in classrooms. Not only could it be beneficial for a student to apply what they are learning in class by finding web resources that relate to it, the sharing and collaborative features help as well. Students can share their perspectives by annotating what they find, but other students can also provide what they learned from the resource. It allows everyone to see that learning is not something limited to a classroom and textbooks. You can also customize your group by making a  group tag dictionary, so that people use similar and consistant tags. This is such a brilliant feature, because when I'm deciding on tags I always worry that I'm wording something differently than everyone else or that I am overlooking a useful tag. In a professional setting or in a classroom this would also be super helpful because everything can be organized and easier to find in retrospect. 

    For an Intro to Education class I took last year, we had to interview a teacher, among all of the questions, we had to ask about their use of technology in the classroom. The teacher I interviewed was also a close family friend, so she shared a lot with me about how she personally felt it was incredibly important to use technology as much as possible. She said she is lucky that the highschool she teaches in provides courses and resources for her to educate herself on current technologies she can use in the classroom. For this reason, she alway says yes to the offers, another reason however, is becuse they are a benefit to her professional career. In the courses and expos she was able to meet a lot of people and build a network where she can share resources with her peers. She also teaches highschool spanish at an AP level, and having experienced AP Spanish Literature, I can say that the curriculum is not the greatest. However, the teacher I interviewed makes her own curriculum with more technology-based projects and applications of the material, since her students tend to have a higher passing rate than the national AP Spanish literature passing rate, this is something that has increased her professional development. This is an example of how teachers can benefit from using technology, and how it is essential to find wasy to apply modern technology into education. Not all teachers have access to these courses and expos where they can learn about edTech, however it is still important to find ways to incorporate technology into the classroom. I found a website called edCircuit (https://www.edcircuit.com/) that looked pretty cool. It provides videos, articles, and podcasts about the latest resources and news about edTech for all grade levels. They are divided into different categories, one being about online learning and online curriculums. There are also opinion edutorials, so one can see what real educators have ot say about certain issues, or share technologies that can be used in the classroom.