Week Four Blog Post

Week Four Blog Post

In class throughout week four, we were introduced to a few new applications to add to our toolkit. We also had an "app smack-down", which was pretty interesting. Tools that were introduced include Zite, Feedly, Pocket, and Evernote.  The first three mentioned, serve as a personalized news feed including a mash-up of your favorite sites. It really comes in handy when trying to stay updated on your professional area, or if you just want to waste some time. Evernote, being the odd-man-out, serves as a cloud-based notebook that allows you to access all of your notes in a matter of seconds. I have already created various notebooks within Evernote, including various lecture notes. 

I also have read up on Michael Hyatt's article, "How to Use Evernote If You Are a Speaker or Writer". It dives into the practical uses Evernote provides to a public speaker or writer. Throughout college and work, I have had to speak on multiple occasions, and I know being prepared is key. He mentions the documenting articles, digital books, blog posts, and traditional books can be extremely resourceful when writing or preparing a speech. He also mentions the uses of meta tags, so the user can appropriately search past saved documents without hassle.

For our "App Smackdown," I chose Treehouse and Tynker. Treehouse is an application for individuals who want to learn specific coding languages, with an interactive user interface.  It provides in-depth, instructional videos, between each exercise. I presented some code, and generated a preview for the class to see. The next application I presented was Tynker, an education based, coding app, designed for young learners. It presents pre-made games, and allows users to tweak individual components of the game, using code. It gives kids, or even adults, an easy environment to learn visually, rather than the traditional IDE approach. One of my classmates, Matt Waldron, introduced the class to ideone, a cloud based IDE. I think it a spectacular web-based application for both students and professionals. 

Lastly, in our textbook, "The Connected Educator," we were to read chapter two. This chapter focuses on the different aspects of learning communities, and the infinite possibilities for an educator to reach out and network.  These different communities, "local", "global", and "bounded", all have different advantages to others, and offer professional development opportunities.  We are currently participating within a local community in the classroom, where we share our ideas face to face. Professor Calderwood is now introducing us to a more global community, so that eventually, we could enter a more professional oriented network, or "bounded" community.