Report & Reflection (Week 9)

This week's hands on activities revolved around exploring VoiceThread and analyzing a technolgy use scenario from the textbook. As I have already posted my thoughts on these two activities below I would like to share this week's Feedly reader discoveries. I started following a new site called Entrepreneur and found this article called 8 of the Week's Best Business Tweets. It wasn't so much an article as it was a compilation of Tweets, however I really enjoyed it as an aspiring business woman. It made me realize that one of the reasons I enjoy using Twitter so much is that it limits that number of characters per tweet. This might be a downfall to many people, however I feel like it forces you to condense your thoughts and only share the most important information. It also makes it really quick and easy for other users to scroll through their news feed and just glimpse at all of the tweets and gather the important information. If you are in a business program at Brock or any other University I would highly suggest subscribing to Entrepreneur on Feedly as they post a lot of really useful and educational articles.

I hope you enjoy!
Rebecca

Technology Use Scenario

Scenario #14: Mr. Hutchinson wants to keep his students' parents aware of classroom activities. He remembers hearing about using Twitter posts at a technology conference. After doing some research, Mr. Hutchinson finds both positive and negative viewpoints related to using Twitter in the classroom. He believes that for what he wants to do - inform parents of their child's daily work - these posts would be appropriate. Before setting one up, however, he consults with the principal and technology support person to see if there are any legal issues. Both say that what he wants to do is perfectly okay. Mr. Hutchinson then sets up a professional Twitter account and informs his students and parents about where to find the information. Is social media a good way to share information? 

I believe that Mr. Hutchinson acted appropriately when using social media to share information. He was not sure if there would be any legal or technical issues, therefore he consulted the principal and technology support person before going ahead and setting up the Twitter account. It was also noted that he set up a professional Twitter account and informed the students and parents about where to access the information if they chose to do so. This is important because it shows that Mr. Hutchinson did not force information upon the students and their parents. It would have been inappropriate if Mr. Hutchinson went ahead and set up a Twitter account without telling the students and parents, and then started following them and sending them messages without their consent. I believe that social is a good way to share information if both parties involved agree to having the information shared and it is not one party forcing information onto another. 

Let me know if you agree!
Rebecca

VOICETHREAD

This week I used a new digital tool called VoiceThread. At first I couldn't really imagine myself using VoiceThread going forward and didn't know where it would fit into my PLE diagram. However, after giving it some thought I realized that VoiceThread could be very helpful when completing group presentations at school. For example, you could make a power point slide and then each group member could add their comments to the original slide, instead of having to update multiple versions and send them back and forth between group members. Overall, I think that VoiceThread is a really great collaborative tool and I will include it in my PLE diagram under school related digital tools. In my opinion, the only downside of VoiceThread is that it can appear kind of messy with all of the comments under the slides. As well, sometimes people's audio comments would just start playing as a transitioned between slides or if I left the tool open in another tab on my browser. Personally, I don't really feel comfortable speaking at my computer to add a comment and would much rather type my comment out. Therefore, I think that somebody who would rather talk than type would find this digital tool much more useful and efficient. As mentioned above, I will still continue to use VoiceThread as a way to collaborate with group members on class presentations, as I believe the ability to add multiple people’s comments will be useful when drafting a power point slide.