The final blog!
It feels like just yesterday was the first day of classes. Time really does go by faster the older you get. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun during my time in Exploring Your Digital Portfolio. I also have a lot of respect for our teacher (Professor Kyle Calderwood). Not too often do you find someone outside the millennial generation that's in tune with social media. Mr. Calderwood is that exception. He even teaches people Minecraft (that's honestly super cool)! The content of the course itself was also rather refreshing. Social media is starting to be utilized in education more, but I believe it still isn't talked about enough in general courses. It's such a large part of our life and its so ingrained in most people my age at this point that I feel it needs to be talked about more for us to get the most out of it. Now, what I'm going to do is briefly go through most of the things we talked about and did over the course of the semester.
We started off the semester by talking about exactly what I'm doing now! As you can tell by the title this is the first blog I've ever written. It was definitely a learning experience. I always thought of blogs as very informal, but turns out they're also used professionally as well. I've kind of gotten into a rhythm as we've gone along and I think I have a good feel for what it's like to write a blog now. Around this time we also talked about developing our PLN (personal learning network). I've thought about it on the surface level, but I've never truly given it much thought as to who I'm connected with online. Networking is a large part of being successful in a business environment. Learning to leverage social media to my advantage in that regard should be very useful to me in the crucial upcoming years.
Next we started reading 'LOL...OMG' (link to purchase here). I thought the book was a very interesting read (apart from the unnecessary fluff I might add). The book is essentially a guide on how to conduct yourself on social media, and the consequences of not doing so. It gave a lot of really good tips for keeping a professional persona online. The other book we read part of this semester was 'Untangling the Web' (link to pdf file here). This book was all about giving you helpful tools in order to assist you with curation, presentations, social networking, and a few others. I learned about some really innovative new ideas from this book that I don't think I would've found out about otherwise.
This semester I also got to take part in my first two app smackdowns. This was a really interesting experience that I'm glad I was a part of. What an interesting way for educators, business people, doctors, etc. to come together and share new and innovative ways to make their lives in their field more efficient. The app that I used for the first app smackdown 'StockTwits' I think is a great example of this. If I was a broker or a day trader this would be something I would really want to know about.
We also made multiple guest speakers talk to our class during google hangout throughout the semester. The most famous of them being Mark Schlereth. I woke up at 5 a.m on a consistent basis in middle school just to get in an hour of sports center before school (that does not happen anymore). Mark Schlereth was one of the distinct personalities I remember seeing on my tv screen in the morning. So, having him be a guest speaker to one of my classes was an awesome experience. It was really neat to hear more about him as a person. All I knew about him was his immense knowledge of football, but turns out he's a successful business owner as well. We also had someone from the Memphis PD 'hangout' (if you will) with us too. It sounded like he had a lot of experience in his field. It was informative to listen to him talk about some of the hardships and advantages technology has caused for policing.
Lastly, I want to just talk about a few of the talking points this semester. There were a lot, a new one for every class essentially, so I just wanted to pick the few that resonated with me the most. Closer to the beginning of the course we discussed in class, alongside 'LOL...OMG', the ways in which we should conduct ourselves on social media. This was a very critical discussion we had, but one that everyone our age should engage in. We are the guinea pigs of social media. Right now we are setting boundaries for what is and is not acceptable on social media. When there aren't previous boundaries to reference it creates a lot of room for error. Couple that with the fact that most people on social media are young adults and you have the perfect scenario for things to go wrong. We also talked about different presentation tools we can use other than power point to make our presentations more bearable. I know it sounds very hypocritical coming from someone who used google slides for all their projects this year, but it just came down to familiarity. When I get some free time over winter break or when I have a not too intensive workload I want to investigate these tools more in depth. Because if we're being honest with ourselves, power point and slides are boring as hell.
I can honestly say I'm happy I took Exploring Your Digital Portfolio. It was definitely a class that will stick with me for a while and one that definitely gave me useful information for my future going forward.
We started off the semester by talking about exactly what I'm doing now! As you can tell by the title this is the first blog I've ever written. It was definitely a learning experience. I always thought of blogs as very informal, but turns out they're also used professionally as well. I've kind of gotten into a rhythm as we've gone along and I think I have a good feel for what it's like to write a blog now. Around this time we also talked about developing our PLN (personal learning network). I've thought about it on the surface level, but I've never truly given it much thought as to who I'm connected with online. Networking is a large part of being successful in a business environment. Learning to leverage social media to my advantage in that regard should be very useful to me in the crucial upcoming years.
Next we started reading 'LOL...OMG' (link to purchase here). I thought the book was a very interesting read (apart from the unnecessary fluff I might add). The book is essentially a guide on how to conduct yourself on social media, and the consequences of not doing so. It gave a lot of really good tips for keeping a professional persona online. The other book we read part of this semester was 'Untangling the Web' (link to pdf file here). This book was all about giving you helpful tools in order to assist you with curation, presentations, social networking, and a few others. I learned about some really innovative new ideas from this book that I don't think I would've found out about otherwise.
This semester I also got to take part in my first two app smackdowns. This was a really interesting experience that I'm glad I was a part of. What an interesting way for educators, business people, doctors, etc. to come together and share new and innovative ways to make their lives in their field more efficient. The app that I used for the first app smackdown 'StockTwits' I think is a great example of this. If I was a broker or a day trader this would be something I would really want to know about.
We also made multiple guest speakers talk to our class during google hangout throughout the semester. The most famous of them being Mark Schlereth. I woke up at 5 a.m on a consistent basis in middle school just to get in an hour of sports center before school (that does not happen anymore). Mark Schlereth was one of the distinct personalities I remember seeing on my tv screen in the morning. So, having him be a guest speaker to one of my classes was an awesome experience. It was really neat to hear more about him as a person. All I knew about him was his immense knowledge of football, but turns out he's a successful business owner as well. We also had someone from the Memphis PD 'hangout' (if you will) with us too. It sounded like he had a lot of experience in his field. It was informative to listen to him talk about some of the hardships and advantages technology has caused for policing.
Lastly, I want to just talk about a few of the talking points this semester. There were a lot, a new one for every class essentially, so I just wanted to pick the few that resonated with me the most. Closer to the beginning of the course we discussed in class, alongside 'LOL...OMG', the ways in which we should conduct ourselves on social media. This was a very critical discussion we had, but one that everyone our age should engage in. We are the guinea pigs of social media. Right now we are setting boundaries for what is and is not acceptable on social media. When there aren't previous boundaries to reference it creates a lot of room for error. Couple that with the fact that most people on social media are young adults and you have the perfect scenario for things to go wrong. We also talked about different presentation tools we can use other than power point to make our presentations more bearable. I know it sounds very hypocritical coming from someone who used google slides for all their projects this year, but it just came down to familiarity. When I get some free time over winter break or when I have a not too intensive workload I want to investigate these tools more in depth. Because if we're being honest with ourselves, power point and slides are boring as hell.
I can honestly say I'm happy I took Exploring Your Digital Portfolio. It was definitely a class that will stick with me for a while and one that definitely gave me useful information for my future going forward.
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