Journal 7: PLN

Throughout this class, we have discovered many outlets to connect to the professional world via social media and websites. We have looked at Twitter, RSS feeds, and Affinity Groups. The professional learning network which I have joined was the NAAE or the National Association of Agricultural Educators. Reading through the topic posts,  I realized the different concerns and needs that are very unique compared to most if not all subject matters. There are topics about curriculum,  FFA activities, leadership development, conferences and shared lesson plans and lab activities. These are real life situations and experiences that agriculture educators and had and shared with others on NAAE experiences such as activities going wrong and questions on labs and curriculum. The RSS feeds are an excellent source for news as well as my affinity group. I can briefly view over 30 articles with a very short amount of reading. It connects the NAAE with other science news sites where i can pull information of provide relevant topics for the days lesson. In the case of twitter, I do not even  usually use it in my everyday life. I have seen both sides of the argument from the class and I do not think I would use it unless it is a fun creative lab or response from a lecture where they have to create hashtags or utilizes the restriction of one hundred characters or less to generate a response. Overall the experience that I have gained from this assignment has been to reflect and I have seen the various tools  that as an educator, I can use in order to add relevant information or even share my experience with the other educators in my field.  

Journal 6: Self-Reflection

Through out this class I have learned so much that I never thought I would need to know or use. However, now that I have learned all this new information I am grateful and was proved wrong in so many ways. Before this class I never thought I would benefit from learning HTML or how to code or develop simple websites, and provided me with opportunities to use this knowledge in my future classroom with my students. Although I am not well versed or professional by any means, being able to develop a class website, and provide useful information and features on it to my students can greatly benefit rhem and the parents. The thing I found to be most difficult in this class was the labs and assignments in which we had to create several links. Why this was the most difficult and challenging to me was because of the several issues that can arise from moving and saving documents in different places, which therefore would break the link and would require several reattempts and lots of trouble shooting. However, once the issues were solve and I learned to stop moving and reorganizing my assignments it became alot easier. That is why,  on the opposite side of the spectrum the most rewarding assignment for me was being able to link and upload to the server my entire table of book exercises. Although this class has tested my patience on several occasions I have learned several new programs and essentially an entire new language in website development. This class has also made me appreciate all the work and dedication that it takes to create the websites I visit and use on a daily basis.