This week we spoke about digital curation and participated in an Ed Tech Conference.
Digital curation is a topic dear to my heart. I love to organize. As I compile teaching resources, it is important to be able to find them easily. I currently use Google Drive to organize my teaching resources. Michael discussed the benefits of Onenote and Google Keep as well for curating lots of different kinds of resources. We also discussed what kind of information is best kept locally in hard copy (eg personal info), and what is suitable for cloud storage. At this time I keep all my personal information on a hard drive and use cloud storage for teaching and university resources. I think when I get a decent computer I will pay for windows Onenote. It seems like a good way to balance personal and professional information easily and effectively. However, my laptop is currently on its last legs, I’m on a student budget, and I’m not sure what my next computer will be. So in the meantime I am sticking to Google drive and Google Keep out of pragmatic utility. Finally, I will try to ensure I rename files as another added measure to make files easily searchable.
Next, we participated in an Ed Tech Conference where classmates propose topics for discussion and we voted on them. It was nice structure that allowed everyone to have knowledge to share, and topics to learn about. I thoroughly enjoyed Hans’ Scratch discussion. I have always wanted to learn more about Scratch. I have used it a few times in classrooms. Students really enjoy it and there is so much to learn about it. Hans gave a great overview of the different features of the program and how they work together. He showed us how to go some basic character moves and what areas students normally get stuck on. We had a great discussion about computational thinking and understanding conditional language. He gave me some ideas on how to introduce these ideas to a younger audience. I majored in Philosophy and took many logic classes in University, this discussion definitely reignited my interest in logical processes. I feel like Scratch is a valuable tool for the intermediate and middle school range and I will continue to learn more about it.
