Facebook in the Classroom

Because I use Facebook for the produsage project as my platform, I wanted to share with you this really interesting resource. In this article,100 ways to use Facebook in a class are compiled in a convenience list. The authors divide the different ways into seven different categories. Not all the strategies are useful IMHO, but there are a lot of great tips.Below I have outlined some of the interesting features in each category that I did not get to use for this particular lesson:

1. Resources on Facebook
• Attend remote lectures: It is really easy to post lectures and links to existing videos on Facebook
2. Projects & Assignments
• Book reviews: It would be neat to offer a choice of book to read and have students post their reviews on Facebook.
• Journal entries: although people don't really use this feature anymore, students could writes notes to share with family and friends. 
3. Sharing
• Document class trips: Sharing photos and relevant class information seems very easy. Students can take their own class trips and share the experience with other students. 
4. Collaboration & Discussion
• Homework help: Students can use the group page to connect and assist each other through study groups.
5. Classroom Management & Organization
• Get a record that students read what you're writing: This is a great way to make sure that students acknowledge your posts (like button requirements?)
6. Apps & Groups
• Flashcardlet: I checked it out and this is an awesome app that is easy to use for flashcards. Students making their own and sharing would be great!

So far this is what I have tried out with Facebook for my produsage project: EDUC2130 Facebook group

Please check it out and feel free to join the group and act as a student if you'd like :-)

Faculty Focus

Before we part ways in this class, I wanted to bring up Faculty Focus. Have you heard of this site? Check it out if you haven't. They send weekly research-based articles with great ideas!

After taking EME6414, I feel like many of us are qualified to submit and write for this site!

The current article is on mindfulness in the classroom. When I taught at TCC, I would periodically impose a mindfulness practice on my students. I felt this was especially necessary on the days leading up to an exam. I would tell the class to close their eyes, free their minds of worries (bills, grades, family, etc.) and focus on their breaths. The idea is that if they can focus on one thing and release the necessary, it would then be easier to focus on the content in that day's review/lesson.

Would you try this in a face-to-face class? What about a podcast or video in an online class? 

One of the first products I made in the IS program was a video of breathing exercises! Coming full circle. :)

Officially on the clock!

Earlier this week I received my health information cards and benefits information because, as of August 1st, my full-time position at VSU begins! New faculty orientation begins Monday. 

Having that said, it's crunch time now. As of today I can allow myself to get super entrenched in planning and course prep. Just in time to finish my produsage product for this eme6414 class. 

Abiding by ISD principles, my step step is to analyze learner needs and prior knowledge. Check out this Google forms I have made for my future undergrads. 

http://goo.gl/forms/R0aOAdniD9

Let me know in the comments section here or the last item of the survey if you have any feedback. Thanks in advance. 

This photo is one I took of my new building at VSU, Converse Hall. come see me on the second floor. 

Voicethread on Researchgate

Check out my Voicethread showcasing the analytics on Researchgate. 

Checking in. About that schedule...

The the first step to getting better is admitting there's a problem, right? Well, my schedule, that I shared a few weeks ago, did not last long. This class is 6 weeks long with 4 major projects. I'm overwhelmed and digging myself out of a hole. I can't be alone in this struggle, right? Anyone?

Google Maps for Education

The resource below was actually really helpful: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/education/

I really liked playing with google earth and exploring places I haven't been or want to revisit. Maybe one day we will have maps like this of other planets too! 

I was wondering who monitors these pictures. I was "revisiting" WDW Magic Kingdom and came across a random picture of a dude without a background. Who clears all the garbage?

Technology Inside & Outside the Classroom

I have already had several conversations with my new colleagues at VSU concerning technology in- and outside of the classroom. It's a good idea for instructors to have a policy about technology use in the classroom. In particular, I'm thinking a lot about a super section that I will be teaching this fall. It is a sophomore level course on teaching and learning with a maximum of 160 students. Right now about 60 students have enrolled. This will be the largest class I have taught face-to-face.

One suggestion for a large class is having a "laptop section" of the room... But my personal philosophy of technology in the classroom is that it's everywhere and unavoidable. I don't mind if students have their phones or laptops out in class. I see it as their personal responsibility to pay attention in class and I can't distinguish appropriate vs. inappropriate use. If they can have technology out in class and still do well on the assessments, then great. But what about other students that may be distracted by inapropriate use? I see it as their personal responsibility to move or confront this distraction.

One of my colleagues that has been teaching at VSU a long time pointed out that not all students have smartphones and technology at home. Our readings of Gray et al. (2012) made me feel at ease because most instructors surveyed expected students to access technology at school; I agree with this! I feel that I can use technology-based assessments and web 2.0 activities in my class because the technology is at least available at school.

The finding that I did not find reasonable in the study was the fact that a majority of instructors expected students to spend 11 to 20 hours on online assessments over the period of several weeks. I appreciate what Vanessa does in this class, in which she offers different tools and options and has several assignments due in a short period of time. The only way for us to get comfortable with the tools is to practice! For example, I now feel that four blog posts a week is reasonable because I feel more comfortable with the tool.

I do expect there to be a learning curve with my students when offering social media assignments. The same colleague I mentioned earlier stated that her students are online all the time, but do not know how to attach a file to an email. That is because attaching a file to an email is not necessarily part of being social on the Internet. I suggested that maybe having a background in Web 1.0 is actually part of being digital natives... This quote from our reading illustrates this nicely: "While there is no questioning the scale of young people’s engagement with the internet in general, evidence suggests that engagement is biased towards consumption rather than production... it seems they are not strongly inclined to take advantage of using them" (Crook, 2012, p.65).

I think the approach I want to take for this large class is surveying my students heavily during the first week (using Google forms). I want to know what their Internet usage is like. I want to know what tools they like to use already. Because of this EME6414 class, I'm now comfortable using many different social media tools and feel like I could quickly come up with assessments based on the students preferences. In my syllabus I will just write that there will be online assignments that will vary depending on student preferences. That should cover me… What do you think?

Crook, C. (2012). The ‘digital native’ in context: tensions associated with importing
     Web 2.0 practices into the school setting. Oxford Review of Education, 38(1),    
     63-80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577946

Gray, K., Waycott, J., Clerehan, R., Hamilton, M., Richardson, J., Sheard, J., &      
     Thompson, C. (2012). Worth it? Findings from a study of how academics assess
     students’ Web 2.0 activities. Research in Learning Technology, 20(16153).
     http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v20i0/16153

IP and Diginole!

Have you discovered diginole yet? It is a repository in which FSU faculty and students can upload their published works. 

http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/

I chose to discuss this topic because this week's focus has been on intellectual property when you publish something in a scholarly journal, you don't necessarily retain the rights to the work. You can negotiate any aspect of the publishing contract, but I never have.

The link below will take you to the two published articles that I have in the repository. As you can tell, when you download the articles and they are pre-published forms of the works. That's one way to get around this issue because you're not directly uploading the journal article copied out of the journal. You are publishing a prepress version.

http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/do/search/?q=author_lname%3A%22Arrastia%22%20AND%20author_fname%3A%22Meagan%22&start=0&context=1950990&sort=date_desc

The person that explained this all to me is the librarian at FSU, Micah. Vanessa has already shared his Twitter account to follow. He's great! http://micahvandegrift.com/

Step 1 of FACETS: educational psychology sources

If you recall from this week's readings, the first step to curation is finding items - the F in FACETS. I know that many of my students will use Pinterest so I wanted to take advantage of that social media to curate items that will help them in educational psychology. 

To be specific, I will be taking, I mean teaching (ekk), EDUC 2130 at Valdosta State University. This class is an introduction to educational psychology for education majors, called Exploring Learning and Teaching. 

So far I have found these resources on different aspects of educational psychology. The next steps will be to assess the resources. Check out my Pinterest board here: http://pinterest.com/meaganarrastia/educational-psychology/

If you were an undergraduate student, do you think this would be helpful?

How's that schedule going?

I'm curious about how everyone else's schedules are going. This week was pretty successful to begin with because I front loaded my tasks and participation. 

Like many of my classmates I have been blogging away from home. This weekend I was in North Carolina. The region I stayed in was mountainous, meaning poor cell phone reception. To give you an idea of the poor signal, most of the vendors at the festival had to stop accepting credit card payments! Because I could not get a signal, the tweets I wanted to read and reply to wouldn't load. Can't wait to catch up when I get home. 

Overall, my schedule of completing readings on Monday really worked out for me. The tools that helped me stay organized were simply google calendar synced to my iPhone iCal. The blackboard mobile app and the blogger app were also very useful while traveling! However, I have to mention that the blogger app has limited options available and that's why I will go back and add hyperlinks to my last post about the Highland Games. 

What tools have helped you stay on track this week?

Apps for events

As I blog from the Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain NC, I'm thinking about how Web 2.0 tools aid in the facilitation of face to face special events. In the past I have had mixed experiences with apps for events, like Dragoncon and the American Educational Research Association conference. At the very least, the apps provided a map of events. Even at such an intimate event as the Highland Games, such an app would have been useful. What have you experiences with event apps been like?

We Live in Public

Remember Prodigy back in the early 1990s (the internet site, not the band)? We Live in Public is a fantastic documentary about Josh Harris an early internet pioneer that started internet radio and worked on the chat rooms of Prodigy. I used to show this documentary in my intro sociology class to talk about social construction. It's available on Netflix and iTunes. Check out the trailer:

Not only did Josh experiment with putting people in a networked bunker, he also tried to literally live in public by broadcasting his apartment filled with cameras. This blog post includes an interview (12 minutes) with Josh in 2014 in which he talks about how individuals are networked, part of the "cybership." Are you a cybercitizen?

Networked Information - News Today

I was very mistaken about weekly webinars in this class. The only other webinar will be during week four, a whole two weeks away! What is so special about this webinar is that Vanessa secured a guest lecture with the authors of our text, Networked.

In finishing up Part II of this book, I wanted to reflect on some of the author's points surrounding networked information. Among many examples of how being connected online has changed our everyday experiences, the news today was the most salient to me.

News then vs. now: In this section, the authors point out how the inclusion of hyperlinks, multimedia, and interactive forums has radically changed how we learn about and co-create news. As citizens we can generate our own news and be part of history as it is created second to second. The "triple revolution" of the social network, internet, and now mobile empowers individuals to be a part of the news with an important ability to filter and select the information we want to access. 

Growth, variety, differentiation, speed, ease of access, credibility, and social construction of data summarize the change in the nature of information and the "media ecology". But how diverse are sources really? Aren't our experiences engineered? Google has made finding information incredibly easy, but doesn't it also create a uniform experience, as well. (That was the only point that I questioned in this section.)

Ok, now I am experiencing FOMO and have to creep on Twitter. Let me know what you think.

Researchgate & IP

A little over a week ago I tweeted about my Researchgate profile. I'm using this platform to gather data for myknowledge  tracking/sharing project. 

What is Researchgate? Well, it's a social media like Academia.edu and Mendeley. 

Here is a link to my profile: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Meagan_Arrastia

This site creates a metrics based on the number of publications, citation, and activity in the research online.

Just like Diginole, you have to be careful about sharing published works. On the site you should only upload pre-press versions of your work. Like Slide Share, you can share presentation slides. What is different is that it provides a question and answer area where you an consult experts directly. 

Have you used this site? Share your links here. 

What works for me? A System? Maybe

Taking a cue from fellow classmate, I thought I should take a second to reflect on how to tackle the workload in this class. Basically, there are the following tasks to be completed each week:

• Weekly webinars (thank goodness!)
• Readings
• Discussion board posts and responses
• Tweets and responses
• Blog posts, reading, and responses
• Project work (e.g., observing online communities, creating a Voice Thread, making a PLN)
• Participation Logs

Am I missing anything? This week I was figuring everything out and ended up posting twice in one day. I don't think it's a bad thing, but I want to try to spread things out over time. 

I think I will use my Google calendar for now, which is synced with my iPhone, to create the following schedule. I will check in next week and let you know how it goes. 

Monday: READINGS. Even though there are usually many readings, I will try my best to get them all done right away. To break up the monotony, I will tweet reactions while reading and check out my online communities.

Tuesday: After having some time to let the ideas percolate, then I will check out the discussion board to contribute there. Check out my online communities.

Wednesday: Lunchtime webinar. Getting inspiration from the webinar, I will be ready to write my first blog post. Check out my online communities.

Thursday: This will be a day of checking out others' blog and writing my second blog post. Check out my online communities.

Friday: This will be a day of checking out others' blog and writing my third blog post. Check out my online communities.

Saturday: Take this day off and check twitter periodically. 

Sunday: Last blog post and complete participation log. Check out my online communities.

I hope I can handle this! 

Using Blogger - Getting Comments?

I noticed that a lot of my classmates in EME6414 are also using blogger to generate a blogspot for the class blogging requirement. I already tweeted about this earlier in the week, but I wanted to elaborate.

So I have been using blogger for years for different blogs, but never really shared links or advertised the posts before. You can imagine that I never really got any comments. After posting for this class I was shocked to find out that I had four comments for my first post. I totally discovered this by accident when checking out my own blog. I did not automatically get a notification! 

I figured out that I have to manually set blogger to email me a notification - this was not automatic. And it wasn't intuitive to me when looking for the settings. I first looked under Comments - nope! This is what you do:

1. Go to your Blogger dashboard, then click on Settings.
2. Next, click on Mobile and email.
3. That's where you can set an email address for comment notification. Notice, you can set more than one.

I hope this helps someone. :)

D2L: Learning Management System

This summer, it is my goal to learn the most about the Desire to Learn (D2L) learning management system as I can. At Valdosta State University, the portal to D2L is called BlazeVIEW. When I log in I see a list of my courses. This is a screenshot of what one of my courses looks like. It is blank right now. Later in the semester I will post my progress as I add this. It looks so different from FSU's Blackboard!

I have also reached out to the support at VSU. They have this great place, called The IDEA Center, which stands for Innovative Designs for Enhancing the Academy. Even though Web 2.0 has changed the way that we learn and teach, it's nice to know that there are still physical places you can go to get help. One of the fellows there, Dr. Kathleen Lowney, helped me by letting me know that there is, in fact, a mobile app for D2L. This is what the app looks in the App Store. When I downloaded it and looked for the D2L section, it was not intuitive. More on this later.

It also look's like VSU has a Center for e-Learning, and they have a blog too! Looks like I have lots of online tools to figure out.

#EME6414 Post 1: Time Management & Writing Tools

I'm three days into Dr. Dennen's Web 2.0 class and we have hit the ground running. After our one-hour webinar today, the course structure really fell into place for me. I will be using this blog during these six weeks to post my reflections on the topic for each week and share different interesting finds.

I feel like this is the biggest online class I have ever taken, which isn't true because there are only 36 students. It's not like a MOOC or anything... It's just that everyone has such interesting discussion board posts and stories, and soon blog posts, that I find it hard to grasp everything... plus get all the reading done. 

For my first post I wanted to share a little handout I made for FSU graduate students on resources on and off campus to help with any writing concerns you may have. I also listed some strategies here to help with starting a writing project.

But what I wanted to highlight for this blog post are the tools listed at the end there. 

• pomodoro.me features a tomato timer that helps me with time management to make sure that I take breaks and get more done in the long run. More recently I have adopted the Chrome extension, Strict Workforce, because it is a timer that does not allow you to access social media and other designated sites during your set work period. That doesn't take aware my phone; unfortunately, self-regulation is still required.
• writtenkitten.net simply motivates a writer by displaying a picture of a different kitten, bunny, or puppy once you hit 100 (or 200 or 500) words written. 
• oldandbusted.drwicked.com is a site also known as Write or Die. Using this free web app, you set a goal number of words and a time limit and can select one of the following consequences
• Gentle Mode: A certain amount of time after you stop writing, a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing.
• Normal Mode: If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.
• Kamikaze Mode: Keep Writing or Your Work Will Unwrite Itself (deleted forever).

Have you ever used these before? Try them out and let us know what you think. 

I hope some of these tools and information is helpful to you in your future grad school writing.