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Ooooh boy. Time for some LEARNING!


In the thrilling YA novel Dread Nation (Ireland, 2019), there was a quote that went something like, “You never feel more mean than in the moment before you decide to stop being mean.”

 Replace “mean” with “dumb” and you get an idea of how I’ve felt this week. This class has been SO HUMBLING thus far, and we just finished week 2. I had no idea how many technologies were floating around out there. And I’m pretty tuned in — or so I thought.

In Joyce Valenza’s article “Fully Loaded,” she listed so many tech tools that she made my head spin. Here are just a few of the tools that Valenza refers to or that I’ve learned about this week that piqued my interest…
  • Digital storytelling tools: Animoto; Vyond (formerly GoAnimate); VoiceThread, FlipGrid
  • Organizations: International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) 
  • Organizational tools: Diigo; Evernote; Symbaloo; Libguide, EdShelf

    •  I also found a Common Sense Media page that listed a bunch of educational blogging tools. I'm particularly interested in how one balances blogging with a student's right to privacy and anonymity. Let's face it...we all said some pretty stupid stuff when we were in school, and I do not want something said in ignorance as a young student to come back and haunt someone when they're in the mid-20s and searching for a job.
    So — what next? I'll tackle this list one-by-one. I won't be able to use every tool, as some of them are quite expensive, but I can explore them, learn from them, and then — on to the next. We did FlipGrid this week during class, and I plan to use EdShelf tomorrow for my "day job." (Otherwise known as my job.) So I'm already on my way. :-)




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