Week #3 - EDUC5101G Responses to Posts

Rachel's Post: http://racheleduc5101.blogspot.ca/2016/01/analyzing-and-categorizing-online.html#comment-form

Hi Rachel! I enjoyed reading your post regarding online digital tools.

I like the structure of the Infographic you shared whereby it groups the tools (creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding and remembering).  I initially thought this structure was Bloom’s Taxonomy, but when validating, I learned that this structure is a 2001 revised Bloom’s Taxonomy - particularly helpful when writing test questions (Forehand, 2016).

I’m impressed you were able to identify tools that were missing on Professor Power’s list.  Other than learning about Zotero in our course, the other tools are not familiar to me.  While our team was working on our PBL #1 presentation and we wanted to create a mindmap, Popplet did get raised as a potential. We ended up using RealtimeBoard for our mindmap.  Here is a link for details on this tool (free tool for educators and students):

https://realtimeboard.com/education/

While reading about the tools you use as a teacher and which ones you find most useful, I am quickly realizing the value of the Google apps.  Throughout this program Google Docs has become an excellent collaboration tool for our team work, Google Chrome as our browser, Blogger for creating blogs, and Gmail for communication – just to name a few.  I can see why all of these apps and many of the others are useful in the classroom, especially when Google Drive provides students with a storage place that they can easily access and not worry about saving.  In the news today, I heard that Google just passed Apple as the world’s most valuable company. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported very good fourth quarter earnings which drove up the company’s shares – resulting in Alphabet, not Apple, both the world’s most valuable technology company, and most valuable company overall (Solomon, 2016).  One would assume from this story that educators are not the only ones who find the Google apps the tools of choice!

References:

Forehand, M. (2016). Bloom’s taxonomy – Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching and technology. Retrieved from http://epltt.coe.uga.edu/index.php?title=Bloom%27s_Taxonomy

Solomon, B. (2016). Google just passed Apple as the world’s most valuable company. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/02/01/google-just-passed-apple-as-the-worlds-most-valuable-company/#792d28c516f9

Michelle Mouton's Post:  http://moutondigitaltools.blogspot.ca/2016/01/week-3-blog-3-over-next-few-weeks-our.html?showComment=1454378958260#c2961690624717521669

Hi Michelle!  I am realizing there is tremendous talent in our fellow M.Ed students in the area of video creation – a capability that I want to develop.  You mention the most useful tool for you is YouTube in tandem with Camtasia.  I have heard lots about Camtasia in this program so will definitely check it out.  I too value the visual and auditory tools – proven to enhance the learner’s engagement and retention.  I will do some reading on the Media Richness Theory - I am familiar with the work of Mayer and Moreno who studied computer-based multimedia learning (see my post for more details on their work).

I have not developed an expertise in Twitter myself as yet either, and still assessing how I will use it to my benefit.  In this week's post, I share the Top 100 Tools for Learning and seeing that Twitter is #1 again for the 7^th year in a row, I’m thinking I need to spend more time exploring this tool.  Maybe if we begin to follow people who we enjoy listening to, it might help us jump on board!  I am following Peter Mansbridge and Justin Trudeau as an example - maybe that will help!