e-Portfolios

Electronic or Paper?.... or both?

This is one of the biggest questions/concerns that pre-service teachers have are about their portfolios. When going to an interview what exactly do administrators want or even look at? The whole point is to come out of that interview with a potential job and sometimes the portfolio can be the make or break. So what do you bring? Should you have both prepared or is it just a waste of time to make them both?

For the purpose of this course we are of course required to create an online portfolio. We looked at a couple of examples in class and naturally looked amazing! However, I've never made one before, so where do you start? What do you use to make one? What do I include? What should it look like? And the questions go on and on. Right now I don't have all the answers, but hopefully after his course I will have created a decent e-Portfolio!!

Wish me luck in creating my portfolios as I also prepare for finding a job! In the mean time I've included some links that may or may not help you out as well!

http://www.edudemic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/eportfolio.gif

"Great Tips and Tools to Create Digital E-Portfolios": Click Here. The great thing about this site is that it also includes ways to use portfolios in your classroom!

A website of weekly tips and detailed advice to creating online portfolios Click Here . The advice varies week to week, but it answers most questions you (or I) may have!

Let me know if you have any other tips or suggestions for creating online porfolios!

Until next time... JD

Word Cloud Fun

All About Word Clouds

In Class last Thursday we were required to create a word cloud about what we thought about technology. Now what is a "word cloud" you ask? A word cloud is a visual representation of user-generated electronic tags or keywords that classify and describe online content. Typically a word cloud  is a group of words in different font sizes and colour or provide links to other information. 


My Word Cloud Experience

The website I choose to use to create my word cloud was Wordle. It was (for the most part) easy and quick to use, but I did have some minor troubles with it. For starters in order to share my Wordle, I had to create it, take a screenshot, save it, crop it, save it as an image and then I could share it. It was somewhat a tedious process, but thankfully it wasn't too difficult to figure out. In addition once you input your words to create the Wordle, you can't go back and edit them. So a word of advice if you choose to use wordle: once you input your words be sure to copy them before creating your Wordle that way you can go back and edit if you need to!

All-in-all making a word cloud was pretty fun! It was an interesting way to share what I as a pre-service teacher thought about technology. Here's what mine looks like!

Wordle is one of many word cloud generators available on-line, others that I know of include; WordItOut, Tagul, Tagxedo.

                  http://tagul.com/

http://worditout.com/

http://www.tagxedo.com/

http://www.wordle.net/

Class Room Uses 

In class we were brainstorming ways that we could use word clouds in the classroom with our students and we came up with quite a few ideas! Some of them were; to introduce or conclude a unit, use as exit slips, introduce new vocabulary, or to review classroom rules. One suggestion that our professor gave us was to use it as a way of analysing or summarizing an article (there is sometimes an option to enter a URL of a website). Out of curiosity I typed in the URL to my blog to see if it worked and this is what I got! 

My advice is to try out word clouds out and see what you can come up with...it's surprisingly fun!

Until my next post... JD

New Year, New Attempts at Blogging

Well here we are again my blogging friends! I'm at it again! Last year I started blogging (for the first time ever) because I was enrolled in the "Internet for Educators" course, a course for pre-service teachers. A year later I am now enrolled in "Using Information and Communication Technology (ICT)" course, which is one of final classes of my Education degree (woot woot), but it again requires me to come out of my comfort zone and try new things... like blogging!

My goal for this year is to... well blog... on a more regular basis and to share more tools and resources that other fellow educators may be able to use themselves. I hope by blogging and by sharing my discomfort /resistance to trying new things that involve technology, that others will hopefully "take the plunge" and try it out too! On that note, if you are interested in trying out blogging, here are some useful links that I found helpful when I first started!

http://www.andy-morley.co.uk/blogging/tips-for-blogging/

http://www.aglimpseinsideblog.com/2012/11/blogging-tip-adding-labels-to-your-blog.html

http://oscarmini.com/2013/01/7-useful-blogging-tips-for-newbie-bloggers.html

I'm excited (and nervous) to find out what I'll learn this semester and even more excited that in a little over 4 months that I will be graduating and a fully certified teacher... as long as I keep up with my blogging that is! Wish me luck!

Until my next post... JD