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...

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...

     We are almost halfway through the semester of Exploring Your Digital Portfolio and we have absorbed a significant amount of information.  But, there is always room for more learning. This week's lesson centered around writing an APA style paper which I was not familiar with at all.  I have written MLA style papers in previous courses.  We were sent a link to a You Tube video curated by Tom Kluxen , one of the head tutors of the Writing Center at Stockton University Here is my synopsis of the video.       The video is about 40 minutes in length and provides key guidelines for writing an APA style paper. APA is an acronym for the American Psychological Association.  This style of paper is used in research papers in the social science fields.  Research in these fields is constantly changing and updating so the information available does as well. The two key components of this paper according to Tom are format and ci...

 Week 4 of Exploring Your Digital Portfolio introduced me to my digital footprint.  Prior to this class,  it was a term that I myself had never used.  In her blog What is Your Digital Footprint?,  Lisa Nielsen provides a definition from Webopedia  that describes it as, the trail, traces or footprints that people leave online. It is information transmitted online, such as forum registration, e-mails and attachments, uploading videos or digital images and any other form of transmission of information- all of which leaves traces of personal information about yourself available to others online. In her blog post, she also provides helpful information for establishing an online identity. She stresses that what you do online is permanent so careful consideration should be taken when establishing your digital trail. Giving millions of people access to so much of your personal information online can be very dangerous and have negative consequences. ...

Our third week of Exploring Your Digital Portfolio was chock full of information as usual.  We explored several new options for organization, automation, and research. As previously discussed, we have work on developing a PLN (professional learning network).  A requirement for the development is being able to educate yourself and others in your network.  Professor Calderwood introduced us to two additional sources of information that would further help to automate our engagement within our network. The first source of information was Flipboard . Using this website or app we are able to personalize content based on our interests and desired careers.  Each day current news articles are delivered to our inboxes or an alert is sent from the application. It gives us the ability to learn and to share relevant information with our PLN. The use of the application is free.  The second source of information we learned to use was Paperli .  The use of this website ...

     Our lecture for the second class of Exploring Your Digital Portfolio was about Google.  I have to say my mind was blown.  Being 20+  years older than the average college student, I literally had no idea of a fraction of what Google was capable. I have only used it to search the web, Gmail, and maps.      The first Google product that I would really like to familiarize myself with is Google Docs. As someone who has been employed in the banking and finance industry for over 18 years I thought Microsoft Office was what everyone used for everything. Two years ago when my daughter was applying to colleges she asked me to proof-read her essay. She told me to just go ahead and make corrections to it on Google Docs.  At the time I just dismissed it as some new technology that schools were using so that students could collaborate on projects and assignments.  I read the essay and made some corrections.  She then sent it to ...

My name is Tamika Martinez Austin and I am currently a senior at  Stockton University .  My major is Criminal Justice. One of my final graduation requirements was an additional writing course.  While browsing through the course catalog I found Exploring Your Digital Portfolio.  After reading the course description I was intrigued to learn how this course could benefit me and increase my knowledge of online networking. During our first class, I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of information relayed in our two hours of time. First, we were introduced to a new learning management system called Schoology .  Access to this site would give us all of the information needed for the course such as the syllabus, links to resources and assignment updates.  I am new to this particular site and find it to be very user-friendly and easy to navigate. The next online tool that we were advised we would be using was Blogger  to create a blog. Our weekly assign...