My Knowledge Sharing/Tracking Activity

Hi everyone!  It took me a moment to really figure out the small collection of learning-related resources that I wanted to share through social media.  I went back and forth as to whether I should create a SlideShare of my career related presentations and publications.  Which ultimately that must have felt boring to me because every time I thought about creating the collection, I got side-tracked.  Then I thought maybe putting together some of my instructional videos into a YouTube playlist which fell flat as well.  I started to think more about what collection of resources would actually be helpful for the people who I work with and help daily.

AHA!  As a career counselor and educator, I'm always looking for a good video when giving a career related presentation or teaching a career course.  How can I engage my students to think more critically about the topic?  Let's face it, while I might be a self-proclaimed 'career need' who could talk about all things career related for hours...my students don't share the sentiment!

So, I have created a small collection of TedTalks for Career Courses & Instruction.  My fellow career counselors and career planning instructors can draw from this collection when preparing for lectures, developing online course instruction, or for other types of career presentations.

 
I am sharing my playlist so that the class can browse my collection of curated TedTalk videos that would be appropriate to share in a career course or presentation. All of the videos are less than 15 minutes and expose learners to career topics.  Not a career counselor or instructor?  That's okay too!  Actually anyone interested in insightful dialogue about ingredients to career success, finding a career passion, or throwing your resume out the window will benefit from this collection of resources.  I'll also be sharing on social this week!

TedTalks for Career Courses & Instruction

 

Edu What?

 Hello!  I don't know about others but it took me a moment to wrap my head about Edublog.  Per my usual process, I created a account and started clicking buttons.  I got all the way to creating  blog in Edublog and then got stumped along the way on the My Class tab.  It was difficult to build my own class for a visualize but that would involve some other people and email addresses.

So, I took to YouTube and found the Edublog playlist.😊

This video explains the purpose of Edublog and many advantages for incorporating into a learning environment.  The free version allows educators to create a customized blog or website space.  There is also a Pro option that starts to unlock more plugins, mobile themes, class tools, and storage capacity...and then the Campus account, well, even more!  It looks like Edublog has a suite of clientele in K-12 through higher education. 

I actually stumbled onto the playlist after watching a video by Practical Tips for Teachers, who was using Edublog as a website for a class. The video is a little slow but does a great job of demonstrating how to create a classroom website.  I don't know about the part of sharing the website with parents, but I guess that is a thing in K-12.  I'm used to all of that being private in higher ed once you start interacting with the helicopter parents.  What about privacy of the other kids??  Just thinking if my student posted something that I wouldn't want another parent to read or see.  Perhaps there is a privacy area on Edublog that I didn't discover yet.

 

Overall, this is a powerful free resource that I am glad has been discovered!  I'm trying to think about how it might be applicable in my current workplace. Has anyone else used Edublogs before?  I'm curious if EME6414 has ever used Edublog to manage all of the course blogs? 😊

 

Symbaloo Review

Symbaloo reminds me of an iPhone home screen and how you can cluster apps together into a collection.  It's pretty neat!  The free account provides some pre-built collections like Google tools, popular shopping tiles, social media, webspaces, and a Symbaloo help center. Bookmarks are called "Symbaloo Tiles" and they are saved onto what they call a "Webmix".  It's sort of like bookmarking your favorites on a browser toolbar -- except you don't run out of space.  I don't know if that happens to anyone else but I can usually only fit 12 or so websites on my toolbar!

Symbaloo is similar to Padlet in some ways but more for websites and links, whereas Padlet will all you to add all sort of content like uploads, screen recordings, videos, etc.  Both are very helpful organization tools.  One downside to Symbaloo is you cannot share your webmix with the free version 😕.  I might keep building a webmix for my own personal usage but would really love it if my collection could be shared.  Aside from my personal usage, I did find it interesting to watch about how educators could create learning pathways for students.  Check it out!

Queen of the Padlet

Hello bloggers.  I am really sort of sad tonight, but also had a great day of exploring Web 2.0 tools and want to share my thoughts.  I just went outside to check on my hives and found Queen Honey's hive was a chaotic mess.  It's been storming a lot here which the bees don't like.  I thought that maybe they were just upset from all of the rain but after further inspection, there was no sighting of Queen Honey.  Honey was a gentle, calm, and soothing sort of a Queen. Her colony was chill.  I felt pretty comfortable going into their box without my bee suit on.  Although I'm still new to all of this -- I would have seen her if she was around still.  Perhaps a miracle could still occur but I am fairly certain that I just lost my first Queen.  My only picture of her is in my head.  RIP sweet Honey and thank you for your service to mother nature!  I'm hopeful that I can revive her colony and help them build a new queen.  

On a happier note -- I love Padlet!! Since going remote, it's been more of a challenge to access resources that my team would usually use in career advising.  In the good old days we would just grab the printed version of a handout and write on it.  Even though we moved all of the handouts to Microsoft Teams...it's like impossible for people to find them let alone utilize the handouts with students!  Even though most of these are somewhere on our website it's still a struggle for them to be utilized.  So, after discovering Padlet, I decided to create a try out Padlet for my career advisors with some of the key worksheets we want they to use with students.  I shared it with my team this morning and they loved it!!  People liked how visually easy it was to access the documents and how we can add important links too.  Anyway, here is my draft Padlet (all of the worksheets are somewhere on our website or available to students in other spaces so I have no concerns sharing with you all 😊).  I've asked for my career advisors to bookmark this link and test it out this week.  Hopefully they will let me know how it works and what other documents/links/resources they would want on the Padlet.

https://fsu.padlet.org/ekennelly3/33ch9bk147hd5agv 

 

My Favorite Collection

I have a lot of love for Instagram, as do my cats as many of you know...but I have not shared yet in this space about my love for another platform out there - Yelp!  I know it hasn't been mentioned yet in the class or featured in our readings as one of the six major social networking sites, but it's possibly my most active networked knowledge sharing activity.  

As an Elite Yelper (3 years proud), I've written over 122 reviews and posted 200+ photos.  In the last 90 days alone, my photos received 23,139 views and and reviews were seen 1,436 times.  Yelp has a filter where you can see your "impact" which is pretty neat.  Yelp users can bookmark, save, collect, check-in, add tips, follow, and friend others.  You can also each achievements and badges -- I only have 2 Firsts badges but I'm very proud of them 😂.  It's hard to be the First to review a restaurant or business!  

Anyway, one of my favorite features of Yelp is the ability to curate.  I have about 16 collections ranging from "Best Las Vegas Eats" to "Sedona Must Sees".  The collections can be public or private, which most of mine are private because I like to use them for my own trip planning purposes.  Another great feature is the ability to follow collections that have been curated by others.  For example, there is a Tallahassee's Elite Picks collection where you can see what other Yelp Eliters are getting excited about in Tallahassee.  People are very excited about Culver's coming to Tally!  You can change the featured collections (curated by others) with a location filter which makes traveling more fun.  Our recent trip to Savannah was a blast due in part to my Savannah Yelp Collection.  It's so fun to explore the restaurants and hidden gems in a town, selectively add them to my collection board, and then go to them!  Am I the only one who gets this excited about that?!  I literally build in a few hours post vacation to go back into my collections and add my reviews/photos.  It's kind of tiring (lol) but when I see the impact of my posts it makes it all worth it.  A friend posted to FB yesterday that her family was traveling to Las Vegas and looking for restaurant recommendations for Father's Day.  I hoped onto my Vegas Collection and sent over a few recommendations within seconds (my rec was Lotus of Siam if you are curious).  From the results shared in the Using the Networked Knowledge Activities Framework to Examine Learning on Social Networking Sites, it is clear that some sites are harder to "see" collections.  This is not the case for Yelp!!  

If you also Yelp...my profile name is Emily K. and here's a look at some of my collections!