Digital Portfolio Ed

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 ...