DAY EIGHT - Happy Monday :)

 Quick Notes

- By keeping a digital archive, you are creating your own textbook for the course. 

- As we continue moving away from teaching through rote memorization, the emphasis shifts to learning from making connections and building networks of information. 

- Creating online content is a legitimate interest, passion, hobby, and career option. 

- The education system was originally designed was to create workers that could be plucked from anywhere around the Commonwealth and be placed in a new role, country, etc. and be able to be functional within minutes. That's not relevant anymore, that's not what we need anymore. 

- Screencast-o-matic has the option to use the Blur tool to blur out faces in videos (as does Google, YouTube, etc.) ***Have to upgrade to Pro for blur tools.

- Clipchamp - Another video editing site. 

- Zotero - Resource collecting tool. 

Today's Reflection

Lots of new tools and resources covered today! I usually use Owl Purdue to create my reference lists, but if I'm working on multiple papers simultaneously the reference lists can sometimes get mixed up. I'm very excited to start using Zotero on a regular basis and have a new way of collecting and organizing my resources that won't overload my bookmarks tabs. 

I've been working on my Mind Meister maps and I'm really enjoying the customizable options (colors, shapes, images, attachments, notes, etc.) and the way it can be used as a lesson planning tool. I often find that I over-plan for lessons and end up running out of time or try to cover too much information in one class. Having this visual tool is a great way to create a template for a lesson planning schedule. It also makes it really easy to access all the necessary resources in one place. Usually when I'm teaching, I have to make sure that I have all my bookmarks open in the tabs and there have definitely been times where my browser has closed and I have to go and re-open each individual resource again. It's a big waste of time, especially when it happens during a lesson, so I really like having an option where I can link all the sites I need in one place instead of having to re-open each tab over and over.