Bits & Pieces

  This week's tools, like Future Me, made me think about how cool it would have been to use them when teaching or in my previous role as a science specialist. One of the barriers that educators encounter is time constraints, lack of knowledge of new innovative tools, and lack of technology pedagogy. 

I was never a big fan of shopping for clothes online. I always found comfort in trying clothes at an actual store. However, the pandemic changed how we shopped in person and try on clothes. I recall fitting rooms being closed for a very long time. Furthermore, because of my body shape, clothes seemed more readily available online than in stores. So...I eventually;ly gave in and began shopping for clothes online. BUT there was one issue...the photos included for clothing items weren't enough and I wanted to see them on real people! Thankfully, clothing stores had an Instagram and customers love to tag and/or hashtag photos of themselves wearing the clothes. Eventually, online clothing stores began adding customer's Instagram photos to their websites to see the item on "real people." This feature became super helpful to me as it helps me determine whether to buy an item or not. It isn't the perfect tool but definitely helps save time!  Related article:  Google’s new

Reading through Kane's (2017) paper, the section on employees' boundaries between employees and professional lives becoming blurred due to the implications of social media stood out to me the most. It made me reflect on my perceptions/views of social media and my employers in the last two jobs I've held. My Job as a Teacher Teaching was my first career right out of college. I used social media, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. When I began my job, I realized that boundaries between myself and supervisors, such as admin, were very important. However, I soon learned that the culture of the school I worked at functioned very differently than what I wanted. Teachers were pretty close and friendly with admin and typically hung out outside work, usually for drinks. I eventually began socializing with the group of folks and admin. It wasn't long before I began receiving friend requests on social media sites. Although I did not want to have people I work with as friend

Similar to Johnnie's blog post...have you ever Googled yourself? I do every once in a while to see my digital footprint. Currently, it is all professional. However, when I first Googled myself, I noticed my voter registration was public. This included my age, address, and voting details. I was immediately creeped out and worried because my age, especially my address, is not something I want to be public. I then went on a quest to research why in the world this information is public and learned that some states compile the data and distribute it to third parties (Pults, 2020). In my research, I learned that you can request some of these third-party websites to remove your information. You can read more about these issues through the article referenced below! Have you searched yourself? Anything surprising you found? What are your thoughts on some states sharing your personal info with third-party websites? References Pults, Charles J. "America's Data Crisis: How Public Vote

I am a former middle school science teacher and maintaining a connection with students was always a priority with me. I made a personal Instagram account around 2010-2011. It mostly consisted of photos of food or artsy stuff (I was really into the arts once upon a time).  I knew my middle schoolers were into Instagram and it was their main social media. In my second year, I thought it would be cool to create a teacher Instagram account to highlight the cool experiments we were doing in class and make announcements/reminders. I recall having many dilemmas and questions about how I would run this teacher account: Should the account be private or public?  Do I want just my students to follow it or do I want anyone in the public following me? How do I take photos of the activities/labs without showing student faces? How will I handle communication from students via this teacher account? What will be the content of this account? Do I want to follow my students back and see their private liv

K-12 education is a big business and we all probably know that. Big money is spent on district and statewide assessments to professional development to textbooks/publishers, etc. A lot of money is tied into it.  We can also recall the significant shift and dependence on technology with the Covid-19 pandemic. Face-to-face instructors and learners became "online" instructors and learners...with little to no preparation. Dr. Dennen's article Technology transience and learner data: Shifting notions of privacy in online learning  (2015) made many excellent points that I wish I had known when I was online teaching during the pandemic. One of the points that stood out to me the most was the importance of online instructors and learners needing a basic degree of technological competence. "Because technology underpins so much of online learning, online instructors and learners need to have a basic degree of technological competence. At minimum, online instructors and learners

I joined LinkedIn sometime in September or October of 2022. I realized I wanted to find jobs outside of a general web search and connect/network with other professionals. Since then, my connections have increased and it's been pretty interesting. Due to my current role as a state science specialist, I have a lot of people in STEM education and research following me. I also have district science folks in Florida follow me, which is nice because I have not had the opportunity to meet them all. I wonder if that will change once I take a break from K-12 and science education and focus on ID. I'm sure it will! Have you noticed any trends (background, job positions) with those that follow you on LinkedIn? Have there been any shifts based on your own job changes?

"Without the participation of the attendees, the backchannel will not function as a way of connecting people elsewhere to the conference." (Dennen, 2011) Dr. Dennen's paper Conversations on the hashtag: Does conference Twitter use promote professional discourse? really resonated with my experience using Twitter to promote our last two statewide summer math training for Florida educators.  I began working for the department maybe two years before the implementation of the new B.E.S.T. Standards for Mathematics...2020. We spent the remainder of 2020 and 2021 planning the first statewide events, three regional events around Florida. There were four tracks participants could attend, K-5, 6-8, 9-12, and a track for school/district leadership. Participants of this event received a teacher kit filled with math manipulatives and supplies they can keep and take back to their classroom.  The goal of the department and our team was to promote the new standards since many school dis

I want to preface this post by reflecting on how I am tweaking my blog as we progress into this course. Some of the ideas I adopted from seeing my classmates' blogs, such as using labels. I have decided to use a new label for posts with bits and pieces of my personal life. I tend to tie in prior knowledge and experience with what we're learning in class because that helps me "anchor" my learning and retain it much better. Although this post is about Reddit, there is a personal experience tied to it. This week, we were encouraged to explore the realm of Reddit. For some time, I had just been a lurker of subreddits...usually, I would google a question that would lead me to a subreddit.  "A subreddit is a specific online community, and the posts associated with it, on the social media website Reddit." Eventually, I decided to make an account to "upvote," join communities and comment on certain posts. Some of them are for learning purposes, like r/Inst