Digital Portfolio Ed

Our class received a message in Schoology for the upcoming class assignment of the night. We were to do some very brief research on electric circuits and bring some items to class, including the following: aluminum foil, cardboard, sliced celery, a banana and Play-doh .  And we were to come to class hungry.  What could we possibly be doing? Making a tray out of cardboard covered in aluminum foil and serving celery and bananas with peanut butter?  What about the Play-doh ? Was is going to be some sort of stress relief class were we make things out of play doh while we eat our fruits and veggies?  Nope....not exactly. We were introduced to Makey Makey kits.  The kit included a circuit board, alligator clips and a USB cable.  We were instructed to make the circuit board into a game controller for the game Frogger , but you had to be able to control the game without touching the circuit board. What?!!  You may as well tell me t...

Our last class of Exploring Your Digital Portfolio was about preparing for job interviews.  For myself this was very helpful because although I have many years of work experience, I have not been on a job interview in many years. I will be looking to re-enter the job market after graduation in May. We had three speakers via skype who are from different professional fields.  Our first speaker was Rob Gurrieri.  He is a manager of software development at Bentley Systems in Watertown, CT.  Rob explained the hiring process for his company.  He said they go to colleges that are hosting hiring events and recommended that we attend at least 2 such events at our university.  For computer science majors,  you should be prepared for a challenge question to test your knowledge.  This is done to ensure candidates can efficiently solve a simple coding problem that requires them to think and give the potential employer the ability to evalu...

We are approaching the last weeks of Exploring your Digital Portfolio and the time has come to create our personal websites.  I have to admit when I first saw this final assignment listed on our syllabus, I was nervous.  As I have stated in previous blogs, I am technologically challenged.  So creating a website seems like it would be an incredible feat for me.  We viewed and discussed several sites in class including: Weebly, Wix , Google Sites , Adobe Spark , Wordpress and About Me . Professor Calderwood suggested that we spend some time looking at each website to determine which one we would choose and made sure to tell us that there should be no need for us to spend any money to create our sites. Everything that needs to be included in our final project can be viewed at: http://goo.gl/KNKLjN .  It is still a great deal of information for me to absorb and organize. Where do I begin? In Brady Krein's blog post Where to Begin When Building a Website , he pr...

Exploring augmented reality  and virtual reality has not been on the top of my interest lists. My ten-year-old daughter is a YouTube fanatic.  She also enjoys Minecraft immensely. There was a recent fundraiser at school which had a prize of VR goggles if you sold enough items.  She was so excited to receive these after we purchased about a million dollars worth of cookie dough and I just couldn't understand her excitement.  Much to her disappointment, the goggles did not function so I did not have an opportunity to share in the experience of virtual reality. Now I understand her excitement and also her disappointment. This past week we took a look a few very cool mobile applications using AR and VR.  It really gave me as a parent a lesson on how much more fun learning can be with technology.  It was a little reminiscent of the View-Master that I grew up playing with, but a thousand times better. Some of the AR apps we explored were Anatomy 4...

We are more than halfway through the semester of Exploring your Digital Portfolio and our midterm presentations were due on March 5, 2018.  For my subject I chose former deputy mayor of Mendham Township Rick Blood.  On February 11th, 2018 he copied, pasted and posted on Facebook , a post comparing undocumented immigrants to rabid racoons and President Donald Trump to an exterminator. The post has been circulating Facebook, alt right websites and conservative blogs since 2016. He experienced immediate backlash from residents and other committee members of Mendham Townsip.  He deleted the post but was still met with an angry reception at a committee township meeting on Monday February 12th, 2018.  He was asked to resign from his position as deputy mayor by several attendees of the meeting.  He initially refused but by the end of the 3 hour ordeal submitted his resignation.  Below is a video from YouTube with more detail of the post. Although he agreed t...

On Tuesday 2/26/2018 we had a guest speaker for our Exploring your Digital Portfolio class.  Her name is Jamie Sinclair and she is an American world championship curler from St. Paul, Minnesota. Jaime has been successful in building her brand through social media.  She manages 3 brands including: Jaime Sinclair No. 21 (her personal brand), Curl Up with Jamie (her business brand) and Team Sinclair (her team brand).  Jamie also has a successful You Tube  channel with approximately 2800 subscribers. On her channel she has different instructional videos and curling tips.  She credits getting jobs and sponsorships to her branding.  Her most recent offer for employment with NBC commentating for the Winter Olympics was obtained through her YouTube following. Jamie stated that she had no prior experience as a professional sports commentator. Jamie shared with our class her tips for easily establishing a brand. The tips she gave us are as follows: 1...