I love to tell people that I am a 21st Century computer nerd. I love computers and what I can learn using them. I actually just heard the saddest thing on Friday when I got a text from a fellow tech person who was announcing that due to his recent diagnosis of ALS that he will have to resign his position at his school's technology director. He also said that the disease has affected his hands so badly that he can not type on his computer and his voice so that the voice recognition software will not work for him either. I can not imagine losing those two things that I depend on so heavily as a technology specialist and enthusiast.
Now to my resources: Please reflect on some web-based resources for education . . for living . . you find useful and why. Share your secrets here. :)
I have 5 different email accounts. I have Yahoo! from back in the mid 90's when I first got online, I did let my AOL account go but I kept Yahoo! for my personal email and my Hotmail account for business, when I place orders online and they want an email address I use Hotmail. Then I got a Gmail account because Google was becoming such a presence and Google Docs was all the buzz in the tech industry, especially in education. Then last year my job decided to switch to Gmail for it's primary mail service and that means that my work email address is also Gmail. Last but not least is my Liberty University email account. I list all of these because I am learning new things with each of these different email accounts. With Yahoo! I belonged to a free Yahoo! Group for my high school reunion that old classmates and I actually used to stay connected for over 10 years. It is only recently that we all got too busy and have moved on to bigger and better placed on the web and away from each other. We are the class of '81 so none of this technology was even around when we were in high school.
I also use my email accounts to subscribe to different ListSERV groups so that I can stay current with the latest developments in the Educational Technology field. Every morning I get new email from Paper.li which publishes "The Arthur Preston Daily", Burlington High School's principal writes a blog, Diigo in Education and Educational Technology Guy who write about things that they have discovered that would be of interest to me in my classroom. I subscribe Teacher Tip's Newsletter, k12appstech which is a Google Group that Google users can ask questions.
I am a Twitter user as I said before and I use it mostly for professional development. I also signed up for Facebook to keep up with students who I worked with during their years at our school and over the past few years I have used it more to follow others in my line of work or who I meet at conferences, etc. all in the interest of keeping up with what is going on with those who are as passionate about technology as I am. I don't follow many of the Apple sites surprisingly but that is because although I use many Apple products, I am not really a fan of their cult like mentality. I love to learn however and am so happy that I have the Internet at my disposal because I am able to find my answers without disturbing people close to me with my question. The Internet is available 24 hours a day and it is never a bad time to ask whatever question you have.
Although I am working on my Master's at Liberty I find that I do at least twice as much research on my own because I have the web-based tools to do the research with in the privacy of my home or on my own learning device.
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