Blog Post #5

Diigo 

Diigo was pretty cool. Before we learned about it in class, I had no idea that social bookmarking was possible. It's definitely a plus as a teaching tool. Teaching is all about collaboration- if you use diigo for your lesson plans in the classroom, you'll have different materials from a whole bunch of different teachers to pick and choose from. That makes for more exciting instruction and less work for you, as the instructor! With all these materials floating around on the internet, diigo makes it easy to organize them and narrow them down with tags and categories. 

Blogging 

I dig the blogging in this class. I'm actually thinking about making a personal blog for everyday life and my photography business. I've been getting my life together lately. A personal blog would give me the space to talk about more interesting things and record this journey that all of us are on- college students and normal, everyday people alike. Every time you write you establish some sort of a relationship with others. I want that. I want to make my writing more public and blogging is a fun, casual way to do it.

WEB 2.0

Web 2.0 is all about social collaboration. When the internet first came out, it was used a database to get information about all sorts of things. 30 years later, we recognize the importance of all this information so readily at our fingertips, but we bring it together with the social aspect. We  all have information to share! Diigo is an educational example, but pretty much anything you use internet can be considered 2.0 - facebook, twitter, instagram, google docs, etc. Today, I wanna focus on those educational WEB 2.0 because they're most relevant to our class (duh... it's called educational technology). Soooo.... I present to you "BoomWriter". It's a site where students read, write, and share and vote on the best papers. It encourages students to put up their best work and it's a fun way to keep your class involved in friendly, educational, competition. You have lots of options for whatever you teach! You can write a story with your students, create vocab-focused assignments, or assess their progress through a built-in grading system. Interested? Here's the link: https://www.boomwriter.com/home