That's a Wrap! #Gen2243

Explore Your Digital Portfolio

This semester I took “Explore Your Digital Portfolio" and gained a lot of information about exploring and creating a digital portfolio. Professor Calderwood helped me realize how important it is to brand yourself on the internet. I have learned how to grow my PLN. A PLN stands for Personal Learning Network and it uses social media and technology to communicate and create with others anywhere at any time. People from all over make requests and share resources. Each individual involved becomes a potential source of information. Through the semester, I've been developing my Personal Learning Network which has helped me find professionals from all over in the art education and graphic design fields. I have also been sharing certain tweets that I find interesting and also have to do with art and/or education. I've been posting my blog on my Twitter to share what I have been doing in class. Last week in class we had to present a Web Portfolio that we made ourselves. Creating a web portfolio is no joke and not such an easy task, but being a graphic designer I needed one anyway so I was happy to do it. Having a web portfolio gives you the opportunity to show off certain things that you normally couldn't with just a normal resume. My portfolio not only has my resume, but it also has all of my artwork which is important for people in the art field. It's a pain to carry around a big book of your artwork and also a resume, so having a web portfolio is a really helpful thing. #Gen2243 helped me expand my PLN with blogging and Twitter. It has been quite clear that technology and social media are here to stay and is now a massive aspect of how many make a name for themselves. I definitely think that everything that I learned in “Explore Your Digital Portfolio" will come in handy in the future and hopefully get me a great job!

 

Play‑Doh Fun Factory

Robyn Hrivnatz

Last week we talked to Robyn Hrivnatz, she works for Microsoft as part of the education program. She works on curriculum development and over seeing the educator trainer program. Before working for Microsoft, Robyn was a teacher. Robyn has always had a love for teaching kids and technology. With all of this experience she has found out that today's kids are like microwaves, they want everything instantly. She also talked about how to use social media to our advantage in our personal and professional life. She said we should take advantage of things like LinkedIn to help us with potential employee.

Makey Makey

Last week in class we used a kit called Makey Makey. It was a box of wires and a motherboard that somehow helped us play a video game. You could tell we didn’t really know where to start. We all started to pass around the items inside the box, the box itself and started searching the web. We first started with plugging in the USB wire to the computer and connected it to the Makey Makey board. Then, we started focusing on the tiny white wires, which is where we went wrong. They were actually not necessary for the first part of our project. After that we tried connecting the color wires to objects, such as a banana and play doh. We even cheated a little and reviewed some YouTube video that really helped us out. We then realized we would have to have one wire connected to ourselves.The items we were told to bring to class included bananas, celery, play-doh, and aluminum foil.  Although we had gotten the board to connect and light up as instructed, the Mario Brothers game was not connecting. After much trial and error, switching and attempting different wiring, we decided to try out Frogger. Apparently all the failed attempts were not failed, yet the computer game itself was not responding. We soon switched over to a letter format, where each of these prompted a guitar string to play a song. Overall, it was interesting and fun.To overcome our issues we really needed to work together. Luckily, everyone was very open to trying different things. The group members interacted with respect and worked amicably together.   This was definitely a fun trial and error project overall. We wish we would have been able to have a bit more playing time after it took us so long to figure everything out. But the pizza was definitely a plus as well! All in all, very nice experience.

Connected Educator

 In Chapter 9 Connected Educator talks about learning and how the classroom are affected by technology. There is so much information out in the world that teachers want to bring into the classroom and, with the use of different types of technology it is possible! The classroom is continuously changing due to technology. This will not only benefit their students, but also the educator. Teachers must consider the four major components of learning 2.0, these include knowledge, pedagogy, connections, and capacity. Knowledge involves building classrooms with collective intelligence. Pedagogy challenges teachers to focus specifically on the students’ passions, creativity, and innovation.  Connections involve teaching and showing students how to create personal learning networks to increase their knowledge. Capacity encourages us to remain open minded to each other to learn something new. The chapter also addressed the moral purpose of teaching and the need to do something powerful to promote change in your school or classroom.

The Cooper Hewitt on Twitter

This week on Twitter, I tweeted a video of The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Cooper Hewitt is the only museum in the nation devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. It educates, inspires, and empowers people through design by presenting exhibitions and educational programs and maintaining active publications. It is the mission of Cooper Hewitt’s staff and Board of Trustees to advance the public understanding of design across the thirty centuries of human creativity represented by the Museum’s collection.

Ask Me About My Website

Website Critique

Last week in class, we first started out by finishing our social media etiquette projects. After that, we immediately got right down to business. We had to work fast this week so we don't have to extend our semester. The class had to begin making an IFTTT. An IFTTT is a free service that lets somebody create a recipe of simple conditional statements, which are triggered by other things. IFTTT stands for "If This Then That". You can find mine right here. We also made a paper.li, which is a site that will help me make tweets about graphic design automatically. The last thing we did in class was to make a Google Slides critiquing the website Billselak.com. With my group, we made a pros and cons list of the website, that can be found here.

The Best IFTTT Recipes For Forgetful People

The article talks about what IFTTT is and the best "Recipes" to use if you're a forgetful person. Going over what an IFTTT is again, it is an automation tool that connects devices, apps, and social networks together so it can produce actions. IFTTT lets you set up a trigger action, that triggers another action automatically. IFTTT is a great tool for making sure you don't forget to do things. The article had some great recipes like- Find your phone, Switch to Wi-Fi, Pay bills on time, Turn off everything when you leave the house, Remember where you parked, and the best and last one is to Remember everything.

How To Become A paper.li Publisher

This page shows you a step by step of how to make an online paper using paper.li. Now again Paper.li is a content producing service. It lets people publish their own newspapers based on topics they like. It gives readers fresh news every day. You can find some perks and helpful hints of paper.li on this page. The site helps me all the time now by making tweets about graphic design automatically and posting it on my twitter.

How to Create a Website With Weebly

Weebly is a free website builder and hosting service. The site was made to help anybody build a personal website. Weebly offers over 100 pages of design templates and multimedia features such as galleries, slideshows, integrated maps, videos, and audio. Site members can alter the appearance of their Weebly-hosted website by dragging and dropping widgets into different places on the Web page. Content can be managed through the Weebly website. The video in this short article is an excellent tutorial to help you create your own Weebly website.

Chapter 4- Untangling The Web

Chapter 4 of our textbook, “Untangling the Web” makes great points about how teachers can use different websites to help their classroom benefit. There are many different kinds of websites that help teachers create modern, interactive environments for their students. Some examples are Edmodo and Kidblog.org. The one I found most interesting is TodaysMeet. TodaysMeet has a lot of tools for teachers to help them manage their digital classroom. One great tool is the Backchannel. The Backchannel allows students and teachers to discuss and communicate alongside the primary activity or presentation. Skype is also a great resource for online classrooms for teachers. This allows a personal touch with his or her classroom than merely typing behind a computer. Twitter is also a very important tool for a teacher. Twitter allows anyone to follow anyone. This is a great tool for networking as an education professional. Users use their “Tweets” for personal, educational, and professional reasons. Twitter is a way to share ideas without being entangled into someone’s personal life or feel like you are being too intrusive.

Art and History On Twitter

On Twitter this week, I shared this link to an amazing video that really got my attention. The video shows an artist named Morehshin Allahyari recreating old statues with a 3D printer. Now, why is this so amazing?  because the status she's making were all destroyed. Morehshin Allahyari saw a video of ISIS fighters destroying ancient artifacts in the Mosul Museum. She was then inspired to start a new project. “Material Speculation: ISIS” is a 3D-printing project that re-creates some of the most important artifacts destroyed by the group. What she is doing is amazing! She also puts a copy of the statue's digital blueprints in the new 3D statue. I tweeted this link out with some hashtags and a little saying that made my phone buzz throughout the day. I tweeted "Art and history can never be forgotten".