blog 7

I have learned a lot about connections on Twitter. Being able to group similar tweets and subjects with a hashtag, or tagging people in tweets is so easy and effective. Social Media has the power to bring together a huge amount of people and connect them with similar content matter or personal relations. This could be awesome if utilized schools, it would definitely benefit students in the Digital Age. I’m imagining an elementary school pen-pal project, yet instead of pen and paper, the students can connect with kids from different schools, states, even countries on Twitter! This is the kind of opportunity the children in current times have. A difficulty I have with Twitter is reminding myself to use it. It is easy, convenient, and effective, yet it is not my first reaction to go tweet something. If I were a teacher, I would need to put a lot more effort into making sure my page was up-to-date for students. 

Creating a website is definitely not easy. Using Weebly was very confusing for me, however, I am extremely technologically-challenged. This class is certainly helping me with that issue, but this tool really proved to be particularly difficult for me. I do believe that Weebly would be one of the easiest ways to create a website, and think it is an awesome resource for teachers. The templates they provided are easily usable for a classroom, and the fact that one can have different pages on their site is great. It is also nice to be able to add something ready for Contact information or in “Newsletter form.” I did, however, think that adding images was unnecessarily tricky to format. Next time to improve my website, I will definitely work harder on making sure everything is clear and easy to navigate. This assignment proved to me that class webpages are important, and can be made simple if utilizing the right aspects of Weebly. My website is: http://karawisser.weebly.com. 

I think Diigo is wonderful. One of the skills I learned from using it is highlighting the main ideas of an article, and thinking about how to quickly explain why I deemed it so important. It is great to be able to share with our group so easily; I can definitely imagine the teachers at a school sharing ideas and information via Diigo. If one teacher found an article that pertained to anything relevant to their school or group, they can easily point out to everyone in their group how/why that topic is important. It would be awesome for the individual teacher to be able to tag websites he/she found interesting and look at them later, or go back over their notes. She can also join a group with her students, and assign at-home readings that she already annotated. This way, the students will be able to see the most relevant aspects of the article or text.