Blog Post #5

     My past experiences using social media as a part of my personal learning network were mostly used to further my hobbies and/or special interests and hyper-fixations. I would use Instagram to find cute cheap or free crochet patterns, YouTube for tutorials or documentaries, and Pinterest for design ideas! It was something that I did subconsciously, but something that provided excellent results. Now I find myself interacting more often with teacher accounts online, or people who have similar ideas or hobbies to me. I find interacting with other experienced teachers to be especially rewarding to me. I love seeing how they make a difference, and knowing that I'm going to do that too one day. I also enjoy hearing stories of how things can go wrong or unexpectedly because it reminds me that at the end of the day we're all human and we can all make mistakes. It's comforting to me.

    The digital divide is something that I am very familiar with, having been on both sides of it. As a kid I grew up with limited technology, especially compared to my pers. I never understood their jokes or references that they made, and had no clue how to navigate anything online besides typing something into a search engine. Things stayed that way until middle school where I was introduced to Word, and expected to write documents, and for the longest time that's how it stayed, besides the occasional PowerPoint. I find that this hasn't yet drastically impacted my college life, because I knew all that I really had to. I can type, use a mouse, and search up instructions for anything I didn't know how to do. Could I have learned more earlier that may have helped familiarize me with technology? Yes, absolutely. Does knowing more about technology at an early age make or break you? Not in my experience.

    Collaborative writing and social annotations are two relatively new ideas that I could see easily benefitting a classroom and learning environment. Collaborative writing is a process I feel that all grades could learn from, discussing with each other to incorporate some of their own personal flair into a story, while social annotations would be perfect for editing and correcting the story online! Social annotation is the process of having a work online and the students being able to collaboratively and simultaneously communicate or propose changes to a piece of art or literature. If I were to use this tool, it would likely be in a 3rd grade class, and it would be to have the children pick a few words from their vocabulary list and  make a story using them, before sharing the online version to the rest of the class to discuss it and make sure there are no major grammatical errors. I would take the time to guide them through the process of using the new technology and adapting their knowledge of how to best work together, but still letting the  explore the new material and information at their own pace.

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