Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Organizing Your Online Life

Overall, I think the Organizing Your Online Life activity was very informative. For starters, I did not even know what EndNote and Blendspace even were. Between these two programs I think that Blendspace will be more useful. Through it you can create lesson plans online and send them to your students. I am all for anything that can help me make a better lesson. However, I am not sure of the practicality of it. Yes, it aides in creating lessons, but I am not sure if it is as productive as just doing a normal lesson in class with a PowerPoint. With Blendspace all the students would need a computer to really get the full effect of the program. But, if I wanted to have students complete a lesson over the weekend it would come in very handy.

EndNote can be useful as well, but it is used for organizing things and I already have a way to organize myself. Furthermore, EndNote has a lot going happening on the screen at one time and I do not really like the clutter of it. I do think that the ability to sync it with your phone through an app is very cool though.

In the end though I think the third program that was part of the activity, Google Drive, will be the most useful for me going forward as a teacher. The capability to share files on it with anyone as long as you have their email is huge, plus I can continue to use Microsoft Word because I can upload file to Google Drive too. I also really like all the different kinds of files you can make such as presentations and spreadsheets. Making presentations on Google Drive has been useful to me in the past. Especially when me and my presentation partners are editing the file because we can all edit it at the same time.

It was awesome learning about these different programs, and if I forget anything about them I can always refer to the handout that was given to me by my group.

3 comments:

  1. Hey Carl! Yea I totally agree with you. I think Blend space was really neat to learn about and it's a really great program. Like you, I also question how practical it would be in the classroom. Some content areas really have no need for Blendspace but I could see it being a cool project for students to work with. We are on the same boat with GoogleDoc too. It is amazing! The collaborative nature of is unbeatable and I think it is so awesome that your mentor teacher uses it at Scarlett. Boy, if I had GoogleDoc as a kid I would have probably gotten more things done in an organized fashion. Great post!

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  2. Mr. D,
    I really thought this assignment was informative as well! I agree with you that Google Drive is "huge," and Blendspace seems like a really sweet way to connect our content to our students at home. I know for myself, that having access to the internet at home and utilizing it to relearn some of the material from class day really helped me to remember and understand things in high school. I also did not thoroughly enjoy how much was going on with Endnote. I personally think that for it to be effective that it should be used by someone who is already organized. I am wondering if there are ways to make its features less clustered on its interface and make it easier to navigate its many different features?
    Best,
    Ms. D

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  3. Hey Carl!

    Thanks for your post. I am growing quite fond of your reflections. Like you, I feel as though Google Drive will come in the most handy for us as educators. I also feel like part of the reason that I think this is because I have the most experience with it, so it is easier to imagine myself using it in the future. However, I did find Blendspace to be incredibly useful. It's practicality never seemed like much of a hinderance. Maybe this had to do with the fact that Jesse gave me an awesome demo of it, or maybe I just wasn't on the same page as you, but either way, I could totally see myself using it as a teacher in the near future.

    Lipstick and napkins,

    Elliot

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