Final Reflection

Hello!  I guess this is my final blog post for EME6414 😥.  It's been fun but I don't plan to continue blogging after this class.  It has been a helpful tool for expressing and reflecting all of what was learned from week to week but it's not my cup of tea for the long run.  And that's okay!  I love how the class allowed me to explore and decide what worked for me.  I can see how blogging could be a future tool used in the classroom, but personally, not something I want to keep up. Anyway, there are so many learning moments from this class that I just am so happy to have been a part of. My very first blog talked about my desire to try new things...like the bees...from week to week I was able to try new tools and integrate them into my work.  It was a sweet thing.  I know we have all been busy bees these last few weeks...so I leave you all with this last video.  This was taken today of Beeyonce's hive.  She is doing great!!  She made it through the entire summer with us -- so glad to have found some great learning resources about beekeeping on Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter 😊

Favorite tool

I don't know about anyone else, but I sort of fell in love with Padlet.  It just seems to work really well for me.  I wanted to share with you all something that I worked on today.  We are getting ready to welcome new career advisors for training -- they should have already completed a Canvas training course before coming to us in-person.  I was initially going to do an in-person "gallery walk" of big sticky notes on the wall where people can add stickers to vote up or down.  For example, a resource or topic that needs more attention during training might get more stickers added to it.  As with most things in 2020-2021, our training changed at the last minute.  Now I am going to have trainees who are face to face AND people joining us virtually.  I don't like it, but that is for another blog...either way -- I decided to create a gallery walk in Padlet.

What do you all think?

https://fsu.padlet.org/ekennelly3/su6g3xp8bws0nbx

Please let me know if the instructions do/do not make sense.  Should people vote up or down for items they want to cover more of in the face to face training?

The last week!

I can't believe this is the last week of eme6414!!  I'm not even sure what to blog about at this point because I am starting to get the summer camp blues.  Also, there are a lot of moving pieces still in this last week of classes.  I am finishing up my 3rd semester of the ISLT graduate program!  WOW.  Who would have thought that after 8 years post graduate school...I would go back to graduate school!  I guess you could say that I wasn't done cultivating my personal learning network quite yet.  My dad always told me that cash was king and so was education.  

I am really happy about the relationships that have been developed this semester and need to make sure that I am connected with everyone on LinkedIn, which tends to be my primary professional space.  I don't think that I will continue to blog (sorry blogger)...I like the brevity of LinkedIn...word counts keep my thoughts on track!  If you haven't found me on LinkedIn already, please do.  My profile is https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilykennelly.

Best wishes as my fellow eme6414's wrap up this last week of summer 2021 classes!

The wild wild west

So, this evening I was able to spend time with dear friends for a 70th birthday party.  These friends act like they are 17 years old but nonetheless are not digital natives.  The topic of the internet, the draft, and social media came up...one of which was a social sciences k-12 teacher and professor who was nearing retirement and wanted nothing to do with educational technology!  He said students didn't engage via technology and the classes he taught recently were frustrating due to zoom screens being turned off.  How interesting...given my experience in the class this semester.  As we talked more, it seemed clear that there was a traditional way of thinking which may have closed the door to any kind of educational technology.  Some of it may have been related to comfort level with technology and perhaps generational.  My friends went on about vivid recollections of TV commercials directing people to the world wide web for information and it seeming like the strangest thing since sliced bread.  He said that the students were totally disengaged from the zoom lectures this past year, but I couldn't help but wonder if it was due in part to his resistance toward technology.  As we explored the topics of international perspectives on social media this week, I've reflected on how culture including generational perspectives can influence social media.  Personally, I feel a weird resistance toward Twitter (not sure why!!) but maybe it has something to do with my level of comfort with the tech platform.  I barely got my mom on Facebook...I honestly can't imagine getting her to use Twitter too.  As educators, we may have own biases about educational technology, social media, and the world wide web that we should be probably be aware of -- the conversations tonight helped me think more about educators in terms of their ed tech philosophy and was an interesting reminder that not all educators embrace web 2.0. 

Cuba's Social Media Blackout

Wow. I feel like the topic of social media usage around the world couldn't be more timely.  The news coming from Cuba saddens me greatly, especially after 12 weeks of being fully immersed in the educational and knowledge sharing power that web 2.0 brings.  Can you imagine if your government just turned off Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, or Instagram?  How would we do our homework...let alone communicate with our personal learning networks...

It's not uncommon for authoritarian governments to display this type of power and it's not the first time that disrupting access to social media has happened in Cuba.  Reports from the other week shared that Cuba suffered a widespread general internet outage and then when everyone got back online, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Signal, and Telegram were almost impossible to access from the island.  The privilege to access social media and educational technologies is a lot to process as we come to the end of a semester where I didn't have to think twice about accessing the tools we explored.  

References:

https://www.anywhere.com/cuba/travel-guide/internet-access

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/cubas-internet-cutoff-tactic-global-despots-78804049

Week 11

Hello, fellow EME6414'rs...

How are you all doing?  I can't believe that we made it to week 11!  This summer has been a little bit of a blur and at the same time such an amazing immersive experience in which all of the readings, tools, and projects helped me be a better educator in the workplace.  I honestly don't know how it is Thursday already of week 11.  A few weeks ago we traveled to Denver (which I blogged about) and shortly thereafter, a cold started to brew in my family.  Noooooo!

Ugh, I thought that I was going to escape it but have been sick from Saturday through today.  Actually, today is the first day that I work up smiling and feeling like a human again.  With all of that being said, I am ready to dive into the week topic of international perspectives and have been working diligently on my produsage assignment (in between watching almost the entire first season of Virgin River on Netflix...I mean, what else are you supposed to do while sick and laying in bed for days??) 😏.  I'm working on using Padlet and Pinterest to create a lesson plan that will help career advisors-in-training to enhance their resume knowledge and be able to critique resumes.  I'm excited to share it with everyone soon!

Sutori & Digital Citizenship

We explored a lot of tools this week!  The tools that we checked out had more thinking more about our readings around assessment/evaluation and citizenship/activism.  The Kahne & Bowyer (2019) article Can media literary education increase digital engagement in politics? had my mind swirling with thoughts about how media literacy education would be helpful for the grown ups in the room too, not just our youth.  Election cycles should start off with a media literary course in which users must pass continue accessing and posting on social media profiles 😂 I always find it interesting to observe the friends who engage in online participatory politics and/or targeted politic pressure, and friends or followers who steer clear from any kind of digital engagement of politics.  Especially in the past year or so, the "sharing of political perspectives, mobilizing individuals and groups to act, and applying of pressure to governments and corporations" as described in the reading has been prevalent!  I enjoyed reading about this topic and started to think more about the role of educators on digital citizenship.  I was really excited to find some Sutori resources on this exact topic!  Whew, at least someone is ahead of me in thinking about all of this and developing the lesson plans to foster a future media literate generation!!  Check it out: https://www.sutori.com/story-unit/digital-citizenship-media-literacy

Again, I think the grown ups could all benefit from these Sutori less plans too...

Miro!

I was so excited to see a blog post about Miro this morning and the new challenge!  Guess what?  Earlier this week, I was in a meeting with one of my career advisors and we were talking about how nice it would be to use a skills card sort with one of her students.  Card sorts are these fun hands-on activities that we usually do while face to face with students -- it's like a physical mind or concept map sort of a thing.  Anyway, there are a couple of free tools online for values card sorts (neither of which are amazing) and nothing for skills.  So I said to my career advisor "let me think on this. I'll make us something so that you can do a digital skills card sort next session with your client".  And sure enough, what did I do?  I went back to Week 6 Tools and started to explore this idea.  I first thought of using Padlet but that wouldn't allow for quick sorting action on the screen.  I tested out MindMeister but it keep drawing all of the correlation lines which this is slightly different.  Then, I created a Miro account which was one tool that I actually didn't get to explore fully in week 6.  Oh my!  The templates in Miro are quite impressive.  I was able to find a sticky note template which allowed me to create all of my "cards" and could even give them their own shape or color, and create the card categories that I wanted them to be sorted in.  For example, skills that you are competent, lacking, or highly proficient in.  The really nice thing about using Miro for this is that a client could create a new card if they wanted to during the sort.  Don't see a skill that you have in the pile?  No problem.  You can create a new sticky note, type on it, and sort it to the correct pile.  My team LOVED it and I'm going to make my own values sort and occupation sort as well and it will be our Miro Card Sort board.  You can only have 3 boards with the free version, unfortunately.  But I'll take it!  Here is a sneak peek at my board and I'll connect it to the class Miro too 😊

 

I'm back!

Hello, blog world.  I took a two week hiatus from blogging and have missed being here in this space.  I traveled to Denver, CO to spend a week with family.  It was SO good.  My 4 year old nephew hadn't seen me since he was like 2yrs old and was obsessed with holding my hand.  He kept calling my hands "skinny teddy bear hands".  How incredibly sweet!!  My 9 yr old niece got a little jealous but we took her for ice cream and spoiled her plenty.  After a year of zooming with them it was almost hard to believe we were in person.  My niece showed me all of the drawings that she did during our zoom art lessons this past year.  My spouse is an artist so he would do these step by step art instructions and I held the camera!  How amazing it was to see the actual drawings in person that we had spent many Saturdays constructing together over zoom. 

I know that some classmates did the digital detox earlier in the semester.  My week in Denver was my digital detox!  I totally disconnected from work and school.  My house cameras that I use to watch my cats were even disconnected by mistake!!  My amazing neighbor helped to get those back online so I could creep on my cats while away, but, in general it was a digital detox that was much needed.  I have learned SO MUCH in this class but it's helpful to pull the plug at times to recharge.  As we head into the final couple of weeks, I am excited to work on my produsage and PLN projects.  I have lots of ideas!  

I also wanted to let you all know that my knowledge sharing activity is still getting action on LinkedIn...and...I inspected the bees tonight and queen Beyonce is doing amazing!!

Excited to be back.