Digital Portfolio Ed

As our semester comes to a close, I have had the opportunity to revisit my blogs and review all that we have learned this semester with Professor Kyle Calderwood.  In this final blog post I will attempt to summarize the course's content week by week.  I will say that this course could easily be extended over more that one semester.  The amount of information we learned and tools that we are leaving with is invaluable. For more detailed information on each week, please refer to previous blog posts. Our first week of class we created a blog using  Blogger  and learned about a PLN (professional learning network). We also created professional  Twitter  accounts and had to follow at least 5 professionals that work in our field of study. Each week our assignments are summarized in blog post such as this and we had to tweet out the link to our blog. It gave us a foundation for our PLN that we can grow for our professional careers. During week 2 of class we...

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...