Week 2 Blog Post

Reflect on your own participation in online communities (where do you go? what do you do? what does your family do?

As I think about my participation in online communities and where I go online, I know that I have a varied collection of communities that I belong to. I participate in Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even have tried my hand at online dating with Match.com, eHarmony and Black People Meet.com. I am very comfortable meeting people online and while I don't use Linkedin very often, I am a member of the community. I have used Yahoo! Groups to connect with old high school friends and maintained that relationship online for over 10 years until we all sort of grew in different directions and stopped having the time to checkin online. I use Liberty's online community for my classes and at school I am a part of Schoology's online community that connects our students and faculty with parents to share lessons and grades as well as school related social communication.

My son friended me on Facebook but we are not really in the same online circles since he is 23 years old an my daughter deactivates her Facebook page during the school year.

EDUC630 Week 2 Discussion

Communities and online environments
Web 2.0
Learning with communities and online environments.  Taking discussions and collaboration to online environments within the education community.

When I finished high school I attended a traditional four year college. I completed two years and earned an Associate's Degree but I was bored. I did not feel that the education that I was getting applied to my real life at all, I was an electronics major and while I did and still do enjoy fixing things, I never did anything in those classes that held my interest.  I do remember one time using a soldering iron to attach resistors to a motherboard and enjoyed that but the other lectures and lessons were detached from my world of application.  I waited 12 years before I was ready to attend school again and this time I chose a technical school that required hands on lessons starting the very first day of school, we learned how to program computers and read algorithms among other things. I finished 2 more Associate's Degrees at the technical school, after an internship I was hired to a full time, better paying job.

I loved the direct application of the lessons and I enjoyed my professors but since I was an older student and had a family that I was caring for it was tough to attend classes.  This is why as the Internet improved and became more popular and online universities began to offer classes to more citizens, I jumped at the chance to complete my undergraduate degree.  My online classes allowed me to work during the day and take my classes as my schedule permitted.

In 2010 I was introduced to Twitter and while initially I did not believe that I would need to use the #140 character format and I did not think that I would find a direct application to my learning and/or teaching environment I was wrong.  I attended a workshop that demonstrated the various ways that Twitter is being used in professional development. Twitter has an extensive online community of educators from all over the world.  I attended the #140edu conference in New York City and met many educators who meet online, many of them weekly, to discuss topics that relate to education. I met administrators and classroom teachers alike who come together to share their ideas and to learn from one another on Twitter.  I signed up and immediately found a group that worked well for me and met every Tuesday from 7:00pm - 8:00pm and had participants from as far away as Australia.  It was very cool and what I learned could not be taught in a classroom environment because we just live too far away from each other.

Sarah Garland wrote in the HechingerEd blog an article about Twitter and Facebook's impact on professional development in schools.  They write that "Instead of enduring hours-long workshops a few times a year, teachers could reach out to peers on the Internet" (Garland, S., 2012).  Twitter is an online community that brings many different groups together.

The Internet has the ability to bring experts together, today my students and I watched a TEDxSydney talk about robots that gave the students a first hand look at how robots are being used in Australia.  This is a great use of the online communities.

Garland, S. (2012, August 3). Can twitter replace traditional professional development? [Web log post] Retrieved January 24, 2013, from http://hechingered.org/content/can-twitter-replace-traditional-professional-development_5315/.

EDUC630 Week 1 Blog Post

As I think about technology adoption at the independent school that I work in over the 15 years that I have been here I must say that there have always been great intentions.  In 1998 when I got to the school there were 3 computer labs but the teachers did not have their own devices and most of the students only used computers when they came to school.  

Fast forward to 2013 when everyone has some sort of device in their hand that they use almost every waking hour of every day.  Schools have to keep up with this phenomenon and have had to upgrade their networks to accommodate more traffic and the different ways that technology is being used.  Our school is a boarding school so the technology literally is working around the clock, in my early years at the school we had an IT director who did not support our boarding program. He would go home a 5pm and if the network experienced problems in the evenings then he felt that we could wait until morning. Once he was gone and we hired someone who understood how important it is to have 24/7 access to the network.  

Three years ago we changed all of our technology from PC to MAC and now we are about 90% Apple based products.  We still support some PC platforms if students have them but any equipment that is purchased is MAC.  Our teachers have all been issued MacBook Pro laptops and this year we are participating in an iPad program that requires our 8th and 9th grade students to have an iPad. Their books are only on iPad, eBook editions and will probably move toward that for our other 6-12 grade classes as well in an effort to lighten the backpacks of the students.

The jury is still out as to whether or not the iPad is the ultimate solution for producing work for students.  I do not feel that it is a productivity device and writing papers or creating other types of projects using Keynote or Powerpoint can be a challenge using the iPad.  Our class worked on creating a webpage and the editing of the webpage was a challenge on the iPad because many of the Flash type of features that are added to webpages could not be done on the iPad but worked fine on the computer.

EDUC630 About Me

LeRhonda Greats (Princeton, NJ)

The technology that I am currently using include, Kindle, iPad, iPad mini, iPhone 3, MacBook Pro, Apple TV, SMARTBoard, iMac desktop computers just to name a few.  I am in charge of a computer lab that contains 15 desktop iMac computers that are networks and our building is set up with WiFi access that permits everyone to have Internet access from multiple devices.

This month marks my 15th year at my job and I just celebrated my 50th birthday so I am pretty happy about life right now. My job is one that has evolved over time thanks to the nature of technology and the flexibility of the school where I work I have been allowed to taylor my job to the needs of the students.  Two years ago I was moved from the high school down to the middle school to make sure that the technology skills that I was teaching reached a younger student base.  I am in the process of proposing that next year I not teach classes but that technology be fully integrated into our classes. I have the support of the middle school administrator to do this which is exciting.